Date: Sat, 06 Feb 1999 01:02:38 -0800 From: Kent Stewart <kstewart@3-cities.com> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: "Dan O'Connor" <dan@jgl.reno.nv.us>, Randall Senn <randall_senn@yahoo.com>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, webmaster@linux.org, www@openbsd.org Subject: Re: Unix vs unix-like and unix-type Message-ID: <36BC052E.88FC2995@3-cities.com> References: <051001be519e$66955d60$ed3ce4cf@danco.home> <19990206173822.J79703@freebie.lemis.com>
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Greg Lehey wrote: > > On Friday, 5 February 1999 at 23:00:36 -0800, Dan O'Connor wrote: > >> 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 is very definitely *not* UNIX, and it's not derived from it. But > it passes the specification for UNIX 95%. That's the point I was > making. I don't know where to find that, but you might try snooping > around the OpenGroup's web pages. The original team was from DEC and it started out with a VMS feel to it. If NT had a Posix shell it would come very close to being Unix like. Along with Windows 16, Windows 32, and DOS, it does have a Posix subsystem with most of the with the .1 and .2 levels built into it. There was a shell similar to MKS' Toolkit that reached a beta level. The people that downloaded it wondered if they were trying for the other points of Posix. The NT resource kit comes with an extensive set of commands that function much like FreeBSD at the shell level. > > > 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. > > No, NT has nothing to do with OS/2. They gave OS/2 up as a bad job > (presumably from a marketing point of view) and got a guy in from DEC > who had been working with a successor to VMS (take the next letter for > each of the initials and you get WNT :-). > > > If it is, it begs the question: Why is NT less stable and less > > robust than Unix? > > If it isn't, it still begs that question. Even given the fact that > Microsoft doesn't have to care, I can't understand it. > I think one of the reasons it isn't that stable right now by comparison is because of rampant featurism. There are so many things being added that it doesn't stand a chance. I saw an estimate one time of how many lines of code are going into Win 2000 but it was so outrageously large that I promptly forgot it. -- Kent Stewart Richland, WA To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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