it's a common problem. my favorite statistic like this is the boot loader for the 3b2 (which ran a flavor sys v.3) is larger than the v6 and v7 kernels. shameful IMHO that said while I agree the OSes can bloat my experience is that many of us are unwilling to go back to the same "old system" for anything in production use and unfortunately their is the additional problem is there is rarely an agreement among us as to which of those new features from the bloated ones are the required ones. what I have seen work to a limited extend is to create a new system with learnings over time and try to inject a new stronger strain into the Eco system. this was what Culter was trying do with Mica for vms. but being able to carry old binaries gets very hard. Clem On Oct 6, 2013, at 6:24 PM, Daniel Soderstrom <snaggs at mac.com> wrote: Lighter??? FWIW, you'd be much better off running the latest and greatest on your VAX hardware to take advantage of the performance features contained within VMS 3 0.9 million lines of code VMS 5.4 6.5 million lines of code VMS 7.1 25 million lines of code I'd like to go back to 5.5H4 and avoid the bloat from OO programming. I was given advice previously that 6.3 is best for old VAX's. Daniel