In article <[log in to unmask]>, [log in to unmask] (Shaken
 Angel) writes:
> 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.
 
You can find out more information about this at:
    http://www.lp.se/Free-VMS/
At this point, it's still in the discussion phase (I don't know that any
code has been written yet).  The first platform that they are discussing is
Intel.
 
> 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.
 
Actually, very little of VMS is written in Assembler.  A lot of it is
written in a language called BLISS (a high-level, C-like language invented
by DEC that is specialized for VMS programming).  The rest is written in a
variety of languages including C, PL/I, Assembler, etc.
 
The Free-VMS group is planning on a complete re-write of VMS, though (no
DEC code).  This way, they don't have to worry as much about DEC copyright
infringements, etc.  It's supposed to be based on the Mach kernel.
 
--
                                     Kent Covert, Software Coordinator
                                     Miami Computing and Information Services
                                     Miami University, Oxford, OH
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