Why use U* over VMS

[Guy Harris]

(Dunno if "alt.religion.computers" is the right place, but it's probably
better than "comp.unix.programmer" at this point....)

>  The best thing about RMS is it's ability to support DBMS's which
>generally run circles 'round a similar one under Ultrix/BSD.  Besides,
>it's a little bit simpler to implement a database using a filesystem
>w/ built in ISAM instead of opening a Unix partition and seeking here
>and there.

Does a UNIX system with, say, an XPG3-compliant ISAM library have "a
filesystem w/ built in ISAM"?

If not, why not?

If the answer is "because that's implemented atop the file system rather
than built into the file system", how is this different from VMS, which
as I remember implements ISAM, just as it implements the various text
file types, atop QIOs that just read and write blocks of files?

If the answer is "well, RMS runs in *executive* mode rather than *user*
mode", how much does this really matter?

If the answer is "well, Files-11 lets you store all sorts of attributes
in the file header that the low-level QIO interface doesn't interpret,
but that RMS does", again, how much does this really matter?