02 Feb 2007

Racing to get to the seventies.(Part One)

A quote, attributed to Henry Spencer goes " Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."

I always, being a Linux boy, liked that quote. And I could see it in practice. Linux never hid the fact that it was mostly based on Unix but Dos/Windows did. Microsoft was caught in a bit of a bind with Linux being free that they had to pretend everything DOS was better, everything non-DOS was worse. Fair enough, DOS and the pretty stuff that they placed on top of it was their bread and butter.

But as time has progressed Windows has moved toward looking and working more like Unix. The main change being the fact that the main user of the box is not innately trusted. There are no file permissions on FAT, all files are available to whoever uses the machine. NTFS has changed all of that. Windows 98 didn't need the user to log on, XP does.

It is not my purpose here to trash the Windows Operating Systems of yesteryear. In fact, Linux had some shortcomings in the 90s too. It is my point that it has taken us about 30 years to get our PCs to the point where they are now as safe as the Unix servers that were around in the 1970s.

A quote, attributed to Henry Spencer goes " Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."

I always, being a Linux boy, liked that quote. And I could see it in practice. Linux never hid the fact that it was mostly based on Unix but Dos/Windows did. Microsoft was caught in a bit of a bind with Linux being free that they had to pretend everything DOS was better, everything non-DOS was worse. Fair enough, DOS and the pretty stuff that they placed on top of it was their bread and butter.

But as time has progressed Windows has moved toward looking and working more like Unix. The main change being the fact that the main user of the box is not innately trusted. There are no file permissions on FAT, all files are available to whoever uses the machine. NTFS has changed all of that. Windows 98 didn't need the user to log on, XP does.

It is not my purpose here to trash the Windows Operating Systems of yesteryear. In fact, Linux had some shortcomings in the 90s too. It is my point that it has taken us about 30 years to get our PCs to the point where they are now as safe as the Unix servers that were around in the 1970s.