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What is UNIX, Anyway?
Lieutenant writes "Technology professionals have loosely used the term "UNIX" since the first person had to explain the difference between the Berkeley and AT&T flavors, so it's not surprising to find as many UNIX standards as there are versions of the operating system. Peter Seebach wades through the wellspring of UNIX standards and sorts them out for you, concluding that the rumors of the death of UNIX are (as usual) greatly exaggerated."
For the history of Unix (timeline), read this one:
http://www.levenez.com/unix/
Mirrordot
(Unix->VMS->WNT)
Only an american could be so ignorant of history. VMSVMS did indeed lead to NT, but had nothing to do with unix.
Huh? Unix isn't remotely related to VMS.
Hosted by IBM just because it's a regular column on standardization. In all the years I've written for IBM, the only edit they've ever made on such grounds is that they changed the word "Belkin" to the name "Company X" in my article about Belkin's packet-hijacking routers. Oh, wait; I think they disliked a couple of comments I made about Verisign once. Mostly, if there's no obvious liability, they don't get involved.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
You can (legally) get it for free at unix.org and opengroup.org. An individual paying a $974 annual fee for it has more money than brains.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
"There are two major products that came out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence." - Jeremy S. Anderson
That's ISBN 0-201-54777-5, or 978-0-201-54777-1.
I have more reliable sources than wikipedia: Linux.
I know why I'm using FreeBSD.
The setuid bit on an executable file gives you the privileges of the owner of the file. It is mostly used as setuid-root, but doesn't have to be.
setuid(2) is a different matter of course, because you need to have uid 0 for it to work at all.
It is a mindless bashfest. Nevertheless, it is interesting. There is some truth in their madness. But they themselves admit that it's over the top and to be taken with a grain of salt. At least the book, I'm not sure about the mailing list/newsgroup.
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
Particularly since the "Win32, WinNT, WinXP" part of it are all the same thing, so the real progression is:
DOS, Win16, OS/2, Win32, .NET.
Um what are you smoking?
16-bit windows and dos apps only work if they are non-trivial. I can't upgrade our work computers out of windows 95 and windows 98 because we depend on non-trivial software that doesn't run on the NT line. So MSFT is just as bad as everyone else. Try running some of the early versions of word in XP or win2k3 it doesn't work, and the modern versions can't read the older formats. been there. tried that, considered it lost.
Most linux problems aren't binaries but library and their various and multitude of locations.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Yeah, you'd have to stretch things to make those comparisons. VMS may have some syntactic similarities to DOS, but not as many as you'd think. Let's take a complete file path, for example: /files/stuff/foo.txt
UNIX:
DOS: C:\FILES\STUFF\FOO.TXT
VMS: SYS$SYSDEVICE:[FILES.STUFF]FOO.TXT;1
Though DOS and VMS both use "DIR", while UNIX uses "ls". However, both DOS and UNIX use "cd", where VMS uses "SET DEFAULT". DOS and UNIX also use "mkdir", where VMS uses "CREATE/DIRECTORY". Though UNIX uses "-foo" for command switches, where both DOS and VMS would use "/FOO", but VMS doesn't require a space between the command and the switches.
Clearly you were never forced to program anything to the Win32 API.
There's a common subset of functions available on both 9x and NT flavors of Windows. (With different bugs and sometimes different supported flags, different restrictions on use, etc). Then there's a bunch of functions that only work on NT-based flavors of Windows, not 9x-based. And the opposite is also true. Then XP came along, then Server 2003, each adding a bunch of new stuff to the API that Microsoft (unfortunately) did not go back and also add to the earlier versions of Windows.
There really are at least 3 distinct flavors of the Win32 API, and you have to be careful what functions you use if you want your program to run on all three of them.
For an example, check out the documentation for the CreateWindowEx function.
If you scroll to the bottom, they describe several of the differences in the behaviour of this function on different versions of Windows ranging from 95 to XP.
This situation could have been avoided if Microsoft had had the foresight to separate the Win32 API implementation from the rest of the OS so it could be upgraded independently.
Also I really don't think Microsoft ever wanted anyone going to OS/2.
All through the 1980s, Microsoft pushed MS OS/2 as the eventual successor to MS-DOS. However, Microsoft never made the mistake of throwing away the MS-DOS user base the way some other companies did (eg Apple threw away its Apple II user base when it created the Mac), and continued to develop MS-DOS to meet customer demands and keep up with the competition (eg by adding the Win16 GUI).
Microsoft NT OS/2, a project started in 1988, continued the Microsoft strategy of keeping all options open, by including a portable kernel capable of running on the popular RISC systems of the day (first MIPS, later Alpha and PowerPC), as well as Intel's new 32-bit version of the x86 (the i386), together with three emulation subsystems: MS OS/2, MS-DOS and POSIX. This made the system potentially compatible with all of the major hardware architectures and software platforms. All three of the subsystems ran on top of the native NT kernel, but the primary one (ie the one in which the core system applications were written) was the OS/2 subsystem, since this was the platform Microsoft had been betting on for the future.
In the early 1990s, Windows 3.x took off in the marketplace, while OS/2 continued to languish. This led Microsoft, which has almost always put market demands ahead of technical superiority (a very sound business strategy), to create another subsytem for NT called Win32, which was a 32-bit version of the Win16 API. Microsoft also decided that, based on the market demand for Win16, Win32 (rather than OS/2) would be the primary subsystem on NT. This would make it easier to port software from Microsoft's market-leading, but technologically inferior, system (MS-DOS/Win16) to its future system (NT).
Microsoft's decision to add Win32 to NT created a huge disagreement with IBM, which wanted to continue pushing OS/2, no matter how successful Win16 became in the market. As a result, IBM and Microsoft split their OS/2 efforts, with IBM taking exclusive control of OS/2 2.x development, and Microsoft removing OS/2 2.x support from the OS/2 subsystem in NT (the OS/2 subsystem was thus restricted to emulating OS/2 1.x). Microsoft also renamed NT OS/2 to Windows NT 3.1.
The OS/2 fiasco caused a fair amount of anger amongst those who had followed Microsoft's advice and invested in developing applications for OS/2, but since the vast majority of developers had ignored Microsoft's advice and developed applications for MS-DOS/Win16 instead, this angry minority didn't have much of an impact on the success of the system (but led a lot of OS/2 aficionados to hate Microsoft, and most of them eventually migrated to Linux).
It was done to the extent that was possible. The CLI isn't there to let the user write, it is there to automate stuff. When you want to automate stuff, you use lots of rarely used functions that your system would neglet (making the user RTFM anyway) and monitor space is extremly important. Also, you don't want some weard program messing up with the streams.
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