Merging VMS & UNIX?!

[Dick Dunn]

> ...
> Now that DEC supports ULTRIX, it will be interesting to see, in the years to
> come, if VMS and UNIX will ever be able to merge into a single compatable
> system.

Unfortunately, what might happen is a merger-in-name only--sort of a
marketing-style merge.  Anyone familiar with CDC remember the "merger" of
SCOPE and KRONOS?  It's close enough to DEC's situation to be very
cautionary.  SCOPE was the main-line batch OS for the 6x00's (x=4,5,6,7)
and was slowly gaining needed features but was more rapidly gaining code,
complexity, sluggishness, and bugs.  KRONOS emerged out of a sort of
black-sheep development (Mace) into an OS which was streamlined by SCOPE
standards and had real timesharing (again, compared to SCOPE).  Early
development of KRONOS went better than SCOPE--I suspect they didn't have
enough people working on it to make a real mess.  What happened was that
features began to migrate between the two systems--mostly from KRONOS
toward SCOPE (sound familiar yet?).  Eventually, CDC announced with
considerable fanfare that they were going to marry the two operating
systems and go with one OS for the Cybers for the future.  This system was
to be called NOS (for Network Operating System, which it wasn't).  It
seemed to be a sort of inflated KRONOS with a lot of SCOPE features.

However, what emerged some time later was that there were two flavors of
the system--NOS/BE and NOS/TS (I think I have the punctuation wrong).  "BE"
was batch entry and "TS" was time-sharing.  You can figure out the rest...
-- 
Dick Dunn	{hao,ucbvax,allegra}!nbires!rcd		(303)444-5710 x3086
   ...Are you making this up as you go along?