4 ms·

I think that a lot of interesting things were lost from the IBM and DEC operating systems. I spent a lot of time in VM/CMS and VAX/VMS (plus a little MVS/TSO) i

by dhosek 4y ago

I think that a lot of interesting things were lost from the IBM and DEC operating systems. I spent a lot of time in VM/CMS and VAX/VMS (plus a little MVS/TSO) in the 80s and 90s and my Unix time was relatively limited for quite a while. I really liked Rexx (IBM’s scripting language which they brought into OS/2, but is now pretty much dead) and the way that command line options for VMS programs could be declared independently of the executable (plus its automatic allowance for abbreviations where you could abbreviate a command to its minimal unique prefix).

josteink 4y ago
> I really liked Rexx (IBM’s scripting language which they brought into OS/2, but is now pretty much dead) I’m not sure if it is the same, but back in my Amiga-days we had Arexx which I thought was an amazing tool to do tool-automation. To this day I haven’t seen anything quite like it. The closest is P to ably Windows and COM, but nobody likes that ;)
- dhosek 4y ago
  Yes, the Amiga Rexx was based on IBM’s Rexx. I don’t know if they coded it to be compatible or licensed code from IBM.