I'm a loyal unix guy but as a millenial without much actual hands-on experience with VMS I always love to hear anecdotes like that :) The first time I read about it was in Clifford Stoll's Cuckoo's Egg where it seemed as if there was constant competition between UNIX/VMS folks over which was the more sophisticated/elegant operating system - mostly good hearted competition of a more civilized age of course ;) I vividly remember the one encounter I had with it's weird shell where I had to re-configure an application running on an Alpha machine which had a consecutive uptime of something like 12 years...

One of humanity's biggest enemies to progress are "Not invented here" and the cult of youth. It's often better to start with a blank slate ("being ignorant") because amongst other things like simply having a different perspective (worth 100 IQ points ~Alan Key) it helps with actually starting to build something. Eventually though we should still be aware of what we as a collective have learned already.

To be fair I think Github folks should know their history so this project might be one of the exceptions - looking forward to it! <3

Only in the same sense that public-key cryptography in the 1990s solved the problem of secure electronic communication between two parties. Creating the technology is on big hurdle; getting enough people to adopt it so that it's actually useful is sometimes a bigger hurdle.

I wouldn't say "solved", as it's still pretty easy to accidentally overwrite old versions, but it was a step in the right direction. VMS is full of good ideas that never went anywhere.

Netware too, but that was in the eighties.

I like DragonflyBSD. It versions everything by default. (But no one uses DragonflyBSD of course.)

+1 for VMS.... so good, but so proprietary & doomed to extinction... so unfortunate.

Amen brother. Tragic that we haven't even good back to the 80s

Btrfs and ZFS would have helped, too.