RE: desupport - end of an era
- From: "Goulet, Richard" <Richard.Goulet@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <rjoralist2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2011 14:14:28 -0400
Jesse,
You've got to quit dating yourself like that. People will start
to think your as old as I am!! ;-))
Dick Goulet
Senior Oracle DBA/NA Team Leader
-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Rich Jesse
Sent: Friday, April 15, 2011 10:13 AM
To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: desupport - end of an era
Dick writes:
> Why? I started out on VMS MANY years ago, VAX/VMS. When DEC
I started on a DECSystem 20 running TOPS-20. When the VAX 4000 series
(I'm
ashamed I forgot which!) came in, I hated it. Whatdya mean I can't just
hit
TAB for command completion? DCL? Ewww! It's so complex! Of course I
learned to love it (via the Orange Wall) and see why VMS was superior in
many many ways.
Then came Alpha. The CPU came out of the gate at 150Mhz which was
blazing
in the day. A rough ride on the conversion, but that shear speed was
worth
it.
Only problem was that big companies were writing for Unixes first, then
trying to port to VMS. One main difference between the two OSs is that
process creation is relatively quite expensive compared to Unix, but the
ports never quite got that. It made them slow in comparison and it
seems
that the wonderful OS took quite a beating for that.
DCL and the OS overall was (is?) very elegant compared to any Unix shell
scripting. There's true error handling. There's no need to haphazardly
parse program output that can change depending on when it's run (e.g.
idiotic date formats from ls) since there was an actual API.
Bullet-proofing scripts was really quite easy in comparison.
> I remember one Oracle or IOUG article which stated that "DBA's
> should be the agents of change". Well here you are, your now an agent
> of change.
Yup. While I really miss the power and elegance of DCL, I'll never have
to
deal with running out of NPAGEDYN ever again.
> BTW: We have A VMS server here, no support folks in
> operations, and I can't wait till it hits the dumpster. (Kept me up
all
> night Tuesday when it decided to fry a couple of CPU's.)
The OS didn't cause that CPU to fry...just sayin'. :)
I finally recycled my Alphastation 500, Sun Ultra 5, and Sun Ultra 10
just a
few months ago. I'm sure the "geek" at the big box store didn't know
what
they were.
Rich
Disclaimer: Like the time I caught the ferry to Shelbyville. I needed
a
new heel for m'shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what
they
called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which
was
the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in
those
days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Gimme five bees for a
quarter, you'd say. Now where was I? Oh yeah. The important thing was
that
I had an onion tied to my belt, which was the style at the time. You
couldn't get white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could
get
was those big yellow ones...
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