[Scottish] For comparing VM technologies: VMKNOPPIX released

[Andrew Back]

On Thu, 8 Mar 2007, Dan Shearer wrote:

> Nice to find another Herc aficionado :-)
>
> I've had students at times tell me they really find all this computing
> stuff quite easy. So I give them the instructions to get OS/360 going
> under Hercules as a 370. What they usually do is make assumptions about
> how computers work based on their experience and get it badly wrong. The
> instructions are accurate but obscure since computers Didn't Used To Be
> Like That!

Yeah, it can be relatively straight forward if you can unlearn that which 
you have learnt previous and consider 'the right way', and instead focus 
on thinking about what problems the system tried to address. In this way 
anyone is capable of learning things often regarded 'difficult', inc VMS 
and even more esoteric O/S like DIPOS ( a midrange system that has a 
predefined table for 63 processes, each entry called a 'partition' into 
which you load 'segements' (applications) with random-ish names like 
'XUUA'). It is for these reasons that I get annoyed when people talk about 
Linux/UNIX/OpenVMS "doing things the wrong way". Wait, who said which way 
was right? And just because Windows is everywhere does that mean it is 
'good', so is the common cold...

Andrew