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Microsoft Releases A New Monad Command Shell Beta

Posted by timothy on from the sneer-or-consider dept.

Watercooler Warrior writes "Slashdot originally broke the news that a new Microsoft command shell was in the works when a reader noticed a suspicious job posting by Microsoft India. Today Microsoft released the first really usable version of the shell (codenamed Monad) to beta testers - and anyone who carefully reads the WinHEC slides about Monad will find how to join the beta and get a peek at it. The shell looks like a bunch of old-school Unix and Perl hackers were given free rein to do what they wanted with the .NET framework, and from what is known about the backgrounds of the Monad developers this is probably pretty close to the truth."

5 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. Google by kajoob · · Score: 5, Funny

    Google has a new command shell coming out as well; the name? Gonad.

    --
    Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
    1. Re:Google by Tumbleweed · · Score: 4, Funny

      I can't believe you had the balls to tell such a horrible joke.

    2. Re:Google by bluephone · · Score: 5, Funny

      His only defense is that he's nuts.

      --
      jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
  2. This begs the question... by arkham6 · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...what the HELL were old school hackers doing working for microsoft in the first place. ;)

  3. Is this related to one of those magical moments? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Illustrated here.

    Reminds me of the "Magical Microsoft Moments" story:

    I've been attending the USENIX NT and LISA NT (Large Installation Systems Administration for NT) conference in downtown Seattle this week.

    One of those magical Microsoft moments(tm) happened yesterday and I thought that I'd share. Non-geeks may not find this funny at all, but those in geekdom (particularly UNIX geekdom) will appreciate it.

    Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager (henceforth MPM), was holding forth on a forthcoming product that will provide Unix style scripting and shell services on NT for compatibility and to leverage UNIX expertise that moves to the NT platform. The product suite includes the MKS (Mortise Kern Systems) windowing Korn shell, a windowing PERL, and lots of goodies like awk, sed and grep. It actually fills a nice niche for which other products (like the MKS suite) have either been too highly priced or not well enough integrated.

    An older man, probably mid-50s, stands up in the back of the room and asserts that Microsoft could have done better with their choice of Korn shell. He asks if they had considered others that are more compatible with existing UNIX versions of KSH.

    The MPM said that the MKS shell was pretty compatible and should be able to run all UNIX scripts.

    The questioner again asserted that the MKS shell was not very compatible and didn't do a lot of things right that are defined in the KSH language spec.

    The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and shouldwork quite well.

    This assertion and counter assertion went back and forth for a bit, when another fellow member of the audience announced to the MPM that the questioner was, in fact David Korn of AT&T (now Lucent) Bell Labs--the author of the Korn shell.

    Uproarious laughter burst forth from the audience, and it was one of the only times that I have seen a (by then pink cheeked) MPM lost for words or momentarily lacking the usual unflappable confidence.