Clayton L. Hines ([log in to unmask]) wrote:
: James Taylor wrote:
 
: > Why are Miami's DEC Alphas running OpenVMS instead of UNIX?
 
: You know, after Kent shared the news with me that there is actually a
: group working on writing a free VMS, I had one question for him:
 
: Why?
 
Actually, this would be pretty neat.  I'd like to see a free VMS for
multiple platform machines -- I'd even give it a run on a PC (if it were
available) so I could get a little more familiarity on it... VMS (perhaps
rightly so, perhaps not) keeps the peon user far, far away from tasty
system files, and so constricts learning.
 
I think a large part of the difficulty of porting/creating a free VMS is
that a great deal of VMS is written in processor-specific assembly
language, whereas UNIX is in C and therefore comparably easy to move to new
machines.
 
-- john f., miami university library systems.