Operating Systems (was: Re: Compiling AFLEX 1.4a with Dec Ada 83 3.5-20 on Open VMS 7.1)

["Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com>]

Hey, dude! Its VMS Forever!!! :-)

My understanding of the situation is this: (Someone please stop me before I
go off inventing history again!!! :-) Micro$oft wanted to discontinue the
MS-DOS based OS's in favor of a next-generation product that would be a
*real* OS, complete with virtual memory, real security, networking built in,
etc. They hired a bunch of guys who once invented VMS to do the job.
Figuring it would take a while to get there, they thought there was time
enough to do one more iteration on the MS-DOS based OS and capture a bunch
of cash from the gullible and the stupid, before giving them a *real* OS.

Well, someone on the Win9X project intercoursed-up and let the WNT (subtract
one letter from each position - coincidence? I think not!) team finish up
before they did. WNT was ready - Win9X was not. What's a good capitalist to
do? Throw out all of the Win9X stuff and just sell WNT? Bad Capitalist! No
Cookie! Figure out a way to recoup the investment in Win9X is what you want
to do. They go off and try to find a niche for WNT (business) while
persuading everyone that "No, Really! Win9x actually *is* Shinola" and we
all need to buy it for home use. They go off and disable various
capabilities of WNT so that W95 has some features to offer above those of
WNT and a bunch of folks get "Marketed" without being bought flowers and
taken to dinner first.

Which would I rather have? Given that the only choices are (were) Win95/98
and WinNT/2K, I'd much rather have the NT branch. It wasn't until Intel came
out with a 32-bit address space and Micro$oft came out with NT that I was
willing to buy a PC at all. (Before that, it was Macintosh for me - out of
protest, more than merit. Before that it was DEC-Pro350/RSX11M+. Before
that, it was the stone ages when nobody had a computer of their own at home.
You had a glass teletype and an acoustic modem that you used to dial in to
the PDP-10 wherein you had a Real Man's Computer to play with! :-)

Given an ideal world, what would I prefer? Well, lets start by saying that
Unix (in its various flavors) is a computer virus with a GUI interface. The
most popular OS's today (Add together the various flavors of Windoze and the
various flavors of Unix) all have a C or C-ish API. I'd rather have an Ada
API (OOP style where possible) but I'd settle for an API that at least
passed parameters in a *SANE* manner rather than pointers to pointers to
sturctures of pointers to arrays of raw bytes - which is the sort of thing C
programmers seem to like. (Is Nick Roberts done yet with AdaOS? :-) It
obviously should support the reasonable and customary things we've come to
expect from OS's these days (virtual memory, multiprogramming/multitasking,
etc...)

So far, I don't know of anything out there that meets these criteria & has
any sort of reasonably wide distribution. Any suggestions?

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Gautier of my Mollin" <gautier_niouzes@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:mailman.988906384.3230.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org...
> OK, so which one would you abandon: Win95 or WinNT ?
>