[ale] Segue from MS threatening the community

[Thompson Freeman]

On 05/17/2007 08:51:31 AM, Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-05-15 at 13:28 -0400, Mike Harrison wrote:
> 
> > But then, I believe (no factoids involved)
> > M$ has inherited far more from the *nix and FOSS
> > community than the other way around.
> 
> 
> There have been claims that they used the BSD sockets code
> for the basis
> of Winsock, but I don't know how substantiated those
> claims are.

IF I recall correctly, the copyright notice for that code  
was part of Windows somewhere for years.

> 
> As I understand it, though, Windows NT is based on ideas
> and concepts
> from a hybrid of VMS and DOS.  DOS was based on CP/M,
> which was (very,
> very loosely) based on Unix, or so I have heard.

History. As I recall, Windows NT was developed under the  
leadership of a former DEC engineer who also developed VMS,  
which in turn developed from (?) Digital's RSX11 system for  
the PDP11. The system utilities of NT seem to be more from  
the DOS/OS2 heritage, as well as the windowing interface.  
This is probably a good thing, as the file utility in RSX  
(the name escapes me at the moment) was a rich, powerful,  
hideously arcane command line thing that I recall had a bad  
temper.

DOS did start life as a CP/M type operating system, since  
CP/M was slow getting into the 16 bit arena. CP/m was  
strongly influenced by the DEC operating system RT-11, if I  
remember correctly. The DOS filesystem became a cross  
between Unix and RT-11 with ver 2.0, when the subdirectory  
showed up, but Microsoft has never lost DEC's use of  
logical devices as part of the filesystem (C: drive and so  
forth.) Unfortunately, MS has never seen fit to enable the  
only real nice part of DEC's logical device naming ability,  
and stuck with the limited A:-Z: drive scheme,


Note that the above is from memory, and could use a serious  
dose of literature references.
> 
> 
> > Remember when M$-products didn't have TCPIP?
> > Or E-Mail/Telnet/FTP/DNS/..
> 
> 
> I remember when 3rd party TCP/IP stacks were considered to
> be essential
> software in that world... :-P
> 
>     --- Mike
> 
> --
> Michael B. Trausch
>                     fd0man at gmail.com
> Phone: (404) 592-5746
>                           Jabber IM:
>                     fd0man at gmail.com
>               fd0man at livejournal.com
> Demand Freedom!  Use open and free protocols, standards,
> and software!
> "What can be asserted without evidence can also be
> dismissed without
> evidence." ?Christopher Hitchens
> 

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