Date: Fri, 05 Feb 1999 23:29:58 -0800 From: Frank Warren <clovis@home.com> To: "Dan O'Connor" <dan@jgl.reno.nv.us>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Unix vs unix-like and unix-type Message-ID: <36BBEF76.2A57D67F@home.com> References: <051001be519e$66955d60$ed3ce4cf@danco.home>
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Dan O'Connor wrote: You're both right and wrong, from someone who has been around DOS since before there was a Microsoft involved with it. > > > Microsoft's "NT" environment is UNIX. > > A friend of mine was also told this at an IBM point-of-sale system AIX > seminar. Do you know of any documentation on this? I can't find anywhere > where Microsoft admits to NT be derived from Unix. NT was cloned from UNIX the same way that LINUX was -- only commercially instead of under the GNU Public Virus. What Microsoft did was hire DEC's top UNIX OS developer (sorry, forgot his name) who swore that he was going to write "The world's best UNIX." NT was the result. It was pure UNIX underneathe and highly abstracted. There were to be no hacks at all, a pure microkernel OS that abstrated everything. And it is abysmally slow. As for NT not being stable, it was done blindly. As for NT being slow, when you indirect the living daylights out of everything, what you get is a VERY long pathlength. Basically, all of UNIX was replicated by Microsoft programmers under one brilliant architect in two years time, including X and all drivers. The problem is that there aren't enough brilliant people at Microsoft and it has always had problems writing things from scratch. > When hard drive support was added to PC-DOS, Microsoft incorporated more > Unix-like commands (albeit with a renegade \ directory delimiter and a / > switch character), but I've never seen anything suggesting NT (ne-OS/2) > *was* Unix. Ah, they have eyes, but they do not see. What amazes me, coming here from the PC world, is how ignorant UNIX types are outside of their own world. Gates advertised to the world in the 1983 timeframe that UNIX was the future, and DOS would migrate into UNIX. Xenix was Gates name for his "brand" of unix and it was, much later, sold to SCO. As for using \ instead of /, that was a hack left over from 1980, when command line switches were done with / instead of -. The point of 86-DOS, which was and always has been the core of MS-DOS, was to get an OS out the door for Seattle Computer Products. Gary Kildal and CP/M-86 weren't happening, so Seattle Computer Products just went ahead and wrote their own OS. And CP/M used == the forward slash for options instead of the dash. And so it goes. DOS from version 2 onward was always supposed to "become" unix some day. Gates took a detour with OS/2 and then went right back to it about 1991 when the limitations of Windows 3 were obvious and IBM was clearly going to score with their rewrite of OS/2. >If it is, it begs the question: Why is NT less stable and less > robust than Unix? Less stable? Since when has ANYTHING coming from Microsoft been stable? It took them 18 tries to get DOS 2.0 stable. You should look at an NT 4.0 boot screen. Not only were there 1381 builds to get to NT 4.0, there are fixpacks on fixpacks on top of that. You have to have been at Microsoft to know how it works. And I have been, albeit consulting for one of their client firms. The folks at Microsoft, the line programmers, are nice and reasonable people. The evil at Microsoft comes from the top down. Their problem is that in their drive to take over the world, they need a LOT of programmers and a lot of the rocket scientists won't do what Microsoft wants, which is take the entire world down the path of mediocrity and enforced corporate uniformity in every area of everyone's life in the name of private profit. So Microsoft mostly makes its living based on the work of guys who, while they are nice fellows, are not A players, but mostly B and C players. And due to size, these guys are largely unsupervised, non-UNIX types writing some pretty unmaintainable stuff. Microsoft panders mediocrity at all levels. They are after profit and control, not excellence and liberty. Their reputation for slow, bloated, faulty and ugly code is their reward. Best, Frank > --Dan -- Disclaimer: Any resemblance between the above views and those of my employer are purely coincidental. I'm not sure what my employer's views are, exactly, except that they improve on a day when the stock is doing well. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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