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Date:      Sat, 7 Apr 2001 14:40:24 -0500
From:      Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>
To:        Dale Chulhan - Home <dchulhan@uwi.tt>
Cc:        "chat@FreeBSD.ORG" <chat@FreeBSD.ORG>, My List <TheTechies@onelist.com>, The Trinidad and Tobago Microsoft BackOffice Users Group <mbug@listbot.com>
Subject:   Re: Win NT vs UNIX ( cross fire )
Message-ID:  <15055.27944.187865.22558@guru.mired.org>
In-Reply-To: <3ACF5BED.86A4FB58@uwi.tt>
References:  <3ACF5BED.86A4FB58@uwi.tt>

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Dale Chulhan - Home <dchulhan@uwi.tt> types:
> The following is part of some cross fire passing tru another news group:
> Any comments?

After picking myself up off the floor from laughing so hard, yes.

> Dick, Windows NT was based on VMS not UNIX. In fact UNIX and Windows
> 2000/NT are very different. Windows uses a micro kernel
> architecture, UNIX uses a monolithic kernel.

The speaker doesn't seem to be very familiar with Unix. Some Eunices
use a monolithic kernel. Not all of them do. Apple's OSX, for
instance, is based on the Mach micro kernel. Thanks to the clean
seperation of the APIs (which Windows is missing), it's relatively
easy to mix-n-match these things on Unix.

> That is why you have to recompile/reload the kernel when you add a
> driver. This is unlike Windows 2000 where drivers can be loaded and
> unloaded automatically.

It's been quite a while since any serious Unix required you to
recompile & reload the kernel to add every driver. Some drivers may
still require that, and you may want to do that for performance
reasons, but it's no longer strictly required.

> In fact, you can change IP Addresses on Windows 2000 and you do not
> need to reboot. This is also very unlike most versions of UNIX.

This is unlike *any* version of Unix I've ever seen. That includes all
the mainstream ones for the last 20 years, and a fair number of the
less well-known ones. I'd be interested in knowing which version of
Unix is that braindead.

> The technology in the Windows 2000 Operating System is standards
> based, not stolen from the UNIX OS. IPSec, VPN, Kerberos are all
> technologies that are standards based. Have you ever heard of RFCs?

I'm not familiar with the history of IPSec and VPN, but Kerberos was
developed for Unix. IIRC, MS even ported the Unix code. The GNU people
like to point at MS doing that as a reason to avoid BSD-like licenses
in favor of the GPL. MS also did their usual thing, and didn't *quite*
implement the standard. They extended it in ways that they are working
very hard to keep closed, in order to force users to buy their servers
instead of someone elses.

Many of the standards documented in the RFCs were first developed on
Unix systems. Try cross-matching the names of the RFC authors with the
names of the implementors of the Unix versions.

Nuts - the C socket API that every C implementation I know of uses was
developed for Unix.

> Do you know how long after that the first windows version of UNIX
> came up?

IIRC, Apple introduced the Mac during the '84 SuperBowl, which would
be January, 84. MS just barely beat them to the punch with MS Windows
1.0 (though basically nobody ever used it), so call it sometime in
'83. The first Unix based system I know of that had windowing was
SunOS, which showed up in February '82. So Unix had a windowing system
a full year before MS did. If you only count windowing systems that
enough of the platforms users used to make it a market preferable to
the underlying OS, then SunOS did that from day one, but MS had to
wait until MS Windows 3.0 in around '92, meaning Unix was there a
decade before MS.

> In fact they even chose to call it X-Windows.

No, the did *not* call it X-Windows. Sun's first generation windowing
system was called SunView. Later ones were called SunDEW, then NeWS,
and later OpenWindows.

Even what you're thinking of isn't called "X-Windows". The list of
names the X Consortium ask people to use are "X", "X Window System",
"X Version 11", "X Window System, Version 11" and "X11". Their
documentation calls it the "X Window System", *never* "X Windows".

I'm not sure when X was first shipped with a Unix system. Since it was
at version 10 as of '85 when I first ran into it, it wouldn't surprise
me if it was in distribution before MS's Windows 1.0 as well.

> Today, of all the mainstream Operating Systems, UNIX still has the
> slowest Windows interface.

I can say with equal truth that of all the mainstream Operating
Systems - and most of the minor ones - Windows has the least user
friendly interface.

	<mike
--
Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.

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