[hnthrowaway0328]

I am reading the book, now that you mentioned. I only reach the part when David was hired by Microsoft though. Actually I'm super interested in his earlier works in Dupont and DEC as they paved the way.

I took him as an inspiration. His “What I really wanted to do was work on computers, not apply them to problems.” rings so true with me, and he as a natural leader also makes me look up to him.

[kelsey98765431]

Difficult realm for me to investigate myself. I have found that better than any book is to pull old VMS images out and get them up on a SIMH/Vax emulator and poke around! It's a quite laborious process and documentation of the process is sparse, last time I ended up using the Computer History Museum remote access program to interact with ancient VMS.

To actually learn how to use the thing I ended up diving deep into textfiles.com archives for references to VMS and got the hang of the basics enough to start learning via the online (built in) documentation.

I would also point you towards usenet archives if you want to learn more about the development history of VMS, what what i have been able to piece together it was really rock solid and loved and quite a shame that "open"VMS is mostly just a legacy compatibility licensing agreement and the technology is in a bit of a glacial deep freeze.

The fact that every file on the entire OS had version control - by default - before 1990... that blows me away and I feel like there's so many beautiful secrets to learn from this codebase. I always imagined it would be written in some abstract arcane language, when I learned it was in C i got a bit scared knowing what microsoft calls C has very little resemblance to how C is typically used on unix likes, and with the knowledge that many VAX admins dumped VMS for BSD I was quite afraid I may be out of my element.

I was surprised to find the C library is essentially just posix, I felt pretty much completely at home on VMS compared to any version of windows I have had to write C for. Pleasant experience, shame what happened to it, wish there was more about its story told in an authoritative context like a book.

If you stumble across anything nifty please feel free to share I may come back and read this read again someday.

Cheers

[nickpeterson]

"Work on computers, not apply them to problems" feels like the kind of mentality that gets a lot of people into trouble :)

[hnthrowaway0328]

I think what he means is system programming, not application programming. But TBH I'm so sick of my DE job that I indeed don't care at all about business problems.

Sure we all need them for jobs, hey but that doesn't mean I have to love them. Would that impede my career progression? Sure, but as long as I can get into a system programming without being too close to business, I'm happy for life. Other people can climb the greasy pole, good luck for them.