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Re: Microsoft good press over Longhorn



On Sat, 01 Nov 2003 08:43, Pigeon wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 09:40:01PM +1300, cr wrote:
> > DOS - most of its (very necessary) improvements were written as little
> > apps by third-party developers (often copied from UNIX) and then copied
> > by M$....
>
> Ah, nostalgia... I have quite a rosy memory of DOS 3.x being pretty
> easy to work with. I tend to forget that one of the first things I did
> under it was clone most of the useful command-line tools I missed from
> Unix, using Borland Turbo C, version 1.0... and my tools, unlike
> Microsoft's, took care to do disk I/O in multiples of the cluster
> size, which sped things up tremendously in those days.

I was totally unaware of things *nix in those days.   All I knew was that 
Simtel had heaps of handy little DOS utilities many of which had references 
in their Help files to strange and arcane things like 'Emacs' and 'GPL'...

> It's interesting that MS Word on the Macintosh (MacOS 6) beat the crap
> out of the contemporary MS Word for Windows... not only did it have
> more features, but they all worked, properly, reliably and
> consistently. The Windows version, by comparison, looked like an
> approximate clone knocked up by some backstreet cowboy outfit. Seems
> they can write good apps, but only under Apple's iron fist...
>
> > I suppose I could go all the way back to  Edlin.....
>
> I still use ed...

ed - is that the DOS full screen editor?    Vastly superior to edlin, of 
course.   And it was simple, consistent and it worked.   What more could one 
want?  ;)

cr



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