off topic: found this on Solaris list, what a hoot

[PJ Barbera <hunsolo@gmx.net>]

found on the Solaris mailing list

:)

Peter Barbera

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

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From: klynn@santacruz.org
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 1998 18:30:01 -0700 (PDT)
To: solaris-x86@webpro.eis.com
Subject: S-x86; HUMOR(OFFTOPIC): FW: Magical
Microsoft Moments
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I received this and thought I'd share...
----------------------------------------

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
should work 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. (David Korn is 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. So, what's a body to do when Microsoft
reality
collides with everyone elses?

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