Aucbvax.5883 fa.info-vax utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!info-vax Thu Jan 21 01:12:58 1982 re: Pandora's box >From Peter.Lucas@CMU-10A Thu Jan 21 00:58:25 1982 The favorite reasons (generally) *administrators* (a dirty word) use for selecting VMS is "maintainability". Our Psychology department selected VMS for this reason, against the loud protests of all who actually use the machine. As both a user and a sometime *administrator* of the CMU psychology vaxen (and one who was present at the proceedings), let me set the record straight: The issue of whether to run Unix or VMS in the department was debated at great length in public forum. Our highest priorities were a very stable, reliable lisp system -- not necessarily absolutely state-of-the-art -- and one that could be easily maintained given our limited resources and interest in system development. From these discussions emerged a strong consensus favoring VMS. The final decision was made by vote of the department computing committee, all of whom are users and only I an *administrator*. There were exactly two dissenting votes. The "loud protests" came from a small minority of True Believers. -PAL ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.