Unix is/was a lot of things, it was developing at a much faster rate than VMS - was VMS better than V6/V7 certainly (I ported V6/V7 so that the kernel ran in VM

Unix is/was a lot of things, it was developing at a much faster rate than VMS - was VMS better than V6/V7 certainly (I ported V6/V7 so that the kernel ran in VMS sup/user mode in place of DCL), better than V.2 (the VM subsystems were vaguely comparable) - file systems better than Linux's (there are so many, probably not in total, and that whole record based thing was just a straightjacket on so much). The thing is you're comparing 1 VMS that didn't evolve much (it did get sort of cloned by MS) with effectively hundreds of Unix descendants. As I said I've worked intimately with both, and I don't think VMS gets as much love as it's due, but in the long run I think it was a dead end largely because it was held close by a (great!) company that died