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.