Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!

On 4 Feb 2019 09:07 +1100, from dave(a)horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall): CP/M is (was?) to MS-DOS roughly as UNIX is to Linux (the overall system, not referring to just the kernel); a source of inspiration, but not a direct ancestor. Then let's not get into the Windows / OS/2 / Windows NT confusion, product line splits/merges and rebranding. IIRC, at least until Windows 3.0 (1990), and possibly until Windows 95 when Microsoft did their best to hide the troubled history, Windows applications were _expected_ to ultimately rely on the old-style MS-DOS API for basic operating system services like file management, and could choose to (or were expected to) call those APIs directly instead of going through the Windows API. For a long time, Windows was just a fancy (some would almost certainly say overrated) graphical shell. I, too, would like to see some reference or at least justification for the claim that Microsoft would not have created Windows had it not been for Unix. As I recall, Visi On did use some Unix as its development platform; and Microsoft Windows was created in response to Visi On; but that's the only obvious causal connection between Unix and Windows that I can see, and it's a tenuous one at best. -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor)