There were a
number of them. As others have meantioned, the TGV folks did
one, there were a number of tools from DECUS, and even DEC
actually released more and more UNIX into VMS themselves. I
used to carry a mag tape with vi, the shell and few basic
tools that allowed me to edit things on VMS if I had to deal
with it. The biggest issue was TCP/IP, since DECnet was the
only networking for a such a long time from DEC.
Stan Smith and
I wrote the original VAX IP/TCP support for Tektronix in 1979,
in BLISS and some small amount of VAX assembler. My friends
(former coworkers) @ CMU took this back in and enhanced it
(the CMU folks did a huge amount of work on the mail
interface). IIRC I sent the tape to Danny Klein, but it might
have been someone else.
I have the code
from the CMU's update of our work on 9-track tape, but I think
it eventually also may have gone out on a DECUS tape. But I
do know that this code base would make its way to DEC, where
CJ and Wayne would take it to become the code base that
started OpenVMS's version [CJ once told me he was impressed at
how little they had to rewrite it, mostly removing some
Vaxism's - Stan and I were not worried about portability, we
just wanted something to talk correctly to the UNIX V7 TCP
from 3COM (UNET) and the TCP we had written from the Cyber
NOS].
Clem