[rescue] NeXTSTEP or OPENSTEP?

[Carl R. Friend]

    On Sun, 10 Aug 2014, Liam Proven wrote:

> NT isn't Mica. Yes, sure, NT contains design elements from VMS,
> because it's written by some of the VMS team lead by the lead designer
> of VMS. But it's not a version of VMS -- it's a relative. It's also
> related to OS/2 and to Windows.

    The underlying kernel is >90% Mica, and is related about as much
to VMS as VMS is related to RSX-11 (which is quite a bit).  Once you
really get in under the covers it's amazingly VMS-ish.  NT3 was even
bug-for-bug compatible with some of the worst features of VMS 3 (e.g.
the pending dismount which put the file-system into a twilight state
that required a reboot to fix).  RWAST deadlock, anybody?

    NT4 (XP) was better, NT5 (Win2000) better still, and now that
we're at NT6 (Win 7) the kernel is stabilising out very, very,
nicely (in the same vein in that VMS was trouble until it got up
into the mid 5s).

    My gripe about Windows 8 was the disasterous decision to foist
a tablet interface onto folks who have desk- and lap-top systems
and who have mastered those idioms.  That's not a technical matter
about kernels -- that's a marketing horror-show and has done one
heck of a lot of damage.

    Sure, that tablet device looks like a monolithic appliance, but
under the covers it's still very much a computer, and when it comes
to UIs one size does not even come close to fitting all.  What MS
should have done is decouple the UI and kernel and offer more than
one UI running atop the same kernel.

    Cheers!

+------------------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin)            | West Boylston       |
| Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast            | Massachusetts, USA  |
| mailto:crfriend at rcn.com                        +---------------------+
| http://users.rcn.com/crfriend/museum           | ICBM: 42:22N 71:47W |
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