need help porting ctypes to Linux

[Alex Martelli]

Thomas Heller wrote:
  ...
> The systems at the university were much worse: a Amdahl Unix emulation
> running under CM/VMS (or was it CMS?) on IBM mainframes, used via
> TN3270 emulation on PCs.

A long time ago we used to call it CP/CMS, at least internally, but I'm 
pretty sure the commercial name always was VM/CMS -- Virtual Machine / 
Conversational Monitor System -- you could also run any other operating
system under the virtual machines provided by VM, not just the bare-bones
control program (CP) that in turn propped up the interactive CMS part, but
I doubt many did except in some areas of Research.

VMS was a completely different operating system from Digital Equipment
(aka Digital aka DEC later bought out by Compaq lately merged with HP
which was once known as Hewlett-Packard -- it IS a bit headspinning...),
without any virtual-machine concept (alas) but arguably more usable for
typical interactive timesharing work.  Arguably.  I developed my thesis
first with APL on a VM/CMS machine, later with VMS; then I moved to
IBM research and worked with VM/CMS again; then again later on with
VMS after leaving IBM...  Except in the neat APL interactive environment, 
or in powerful editors such as Xedit [no relation to the xedit of X/11...], 
where VM/CMS shined, I would be hard put to say... except that Unix was so 
heads-and-shoulders above the lot of them that I grasped at it as my 
environment of choice, each and every time I possibly could, whatever the 
strategic choices of my employer[s].  E.g., for a while at IBM I managed
to wheedle as my personal workstation a little-known box called the
"IBM Instruments 9000" -- thus becoming one of the few people in history
who ever even KNEW that IBM ever manufactured a Motorola 68000 box
running Unix.  Even back when the shell choice was between halfway-sane 
sh without any history mechanism, or weird csh with rudimental history
mechanisms, such items as pipes, the filesystem, and lightweight process
concept (compared to VMS _or_ CMS), made Unix still a stand-out...


Alex