reddred wrote:
"Scott Dorsey" wrote in message

Unix-like is okay. But saying it's Unix isn't to my mind.

The Open Group doesn't even want people to say 'Unix-like', but a lot of
people agree with you. To people outside of the field though, I think saying
'Unix' is becoming like saying 'Xerox'.

That doesn't sound very open of them to me.

and reminiscent of some
of the nasty kludges used to make VMS and Unix machines talk.

But now when you NFS mount that file from a Unix box, all of the
information
is lost. You take that ISAM file and use ftp to copy it over to another
machine, and all of a sudden the OS thinks it's a STREAM_LF file and you
need to go in and tweak the format parameters by hand to make them match.

That's relevant to the problems with doing any file system involving some
kind of metadata at this point.

Right, unless everybody is using the same metadata and there is some way
of transferring it along with the file. In an all-DEC environment, you
can share files with the Vaxcluster software instead of NFS, and you can
copy files around through DECNET rather than FTP, and all of the out of
band information is preserved. The problme comes when you are using
filesystems with metadata in a world in which it's not preserved (which
was the big nightmare working with MacOS in a PC world too).

The VMS filesystem is really amazing for commercial database applications,
and it's really a shame to see it going away in favor of lowest common
denominator heirarchical filesystems like the 4.2 and NT filesystems.

Shame about DEC in general. But then, they had standards issues as well -
and standards are almost always the lcd. Hopefully it just gets better over
time.

Everybody did. In the case of DEC and IBM, they started using something
when there was no agreed-upon standard, and then when the standard arrived,
they had too much of an entrenched infrastructure to change over. IBM is
only now moving over en-mass to ASCII, in spite of the fact that they
started with the 360/44 which had ASCII manipulation instructions (which they
later dropped since nobody ever used them).
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."