33 ms·

We had a VAX at U. Hartford as of 2005, not sure if it’s still running. By the time I got to college I already had several years of Unix experience and was conf

We had a VAX at U. Hartford as of 2005, not sure if it’s still running. By the time I got to college I already had several years of Unix experience and was confident I could use its command line. I found it very strange and tricky to use. One thing that stood out was that I could create multiple files with the same name and path, which felt very strange. I wish I had time to explore it further.

KiwiJohnno 5y ago
Interestingly, the lead architect of the VMS operating system, Dave Cutler was headhunted by Microsoft in the 80s to work on their new operating system - Windows NT. There are a LOT of similarities between VMS and NT, under the hood. From memory, the process priority and scheduling systems are (or originally were) identical.
mikewarot 5y ago
The versioning file system is awesome. It made rolling backups for you, and you could configure the number of them per directory. So a listing of text.txt would be something like (going from memory) test.txt;1 date/time file size test.txt;2 date/time file size test.txt;3 date/time file size test.txt;4 date/time file size test.bak date/time file size This offered an intuitive way to undo mistakes. You could always include the version number as part of the file name