[Simh] Transferring the licence file to the VAX emulator

[Clem Cole]

I try one more time on list, but if you want to discuss more, let's go
off-list.

On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 2:56 PM Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:

>
> Not unique to VMS nor even to DEC.

I agree - that is exactly what I was saying.  It was the way I/O was done
in the 60s - which seems to have had a rebirth as part of modern Frameworks.
   And if you are programmer that grew up with I/O byte streams, then you
think in terms of line terminators for text files; not variable length
records.

As Dennis Ritchie once said to me, the whole idea behind a byte stream was
for the OS to just get the bits and then user code do the interpretation
(which of course can be in a library).  But don't make the OS need to know
much -- just get the bits from storage and shove it into memory and let
user interrept them.

My guess is this is one of those cyclical arguments.   Before the OSses of
the 60s, when code ran raw on the HW, a programmer needed to add those
libraries in your runtime deck.   Putting 'record management' into the OS
was seen as easier and made progammng simplier and fast.  The problem of
course is it was different for different systems and languages. So one
person's easy, became another person's burden.

By the time of Dennis and Ken are doing their thing -- they are fighting
the native system I/O.   Streams was a lot easier in Dennis's mind (and I
tend to agree - I came up on IBM systems from the 60s, then PDP-10's, and
VMS before UNIX).   Eventually, as C and UNIX spread, what OSses followed
and languages made easy followed that vision.  And today most programmers
have not seen the 'old ways.'

FWIW: Years later, we start creating all these different ways of packaging
up libraries and methods (a.k.a. programming frameworks) to hide the byte
structure of files.  So instead of learning ISAM/VSAM etc... you used some
different set if API's that called sql-lite, *etc.*..  Who knows what will
be 'natural' in the future.

Clem

ᐧ
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