[TUHS] Dave Cutler recollection about Xenix

[Jim Geist]

Both of them were heavily influenced by DOS. Many of the same commands and
switches from DOS still work today, and pre-powershell scripting is DOS
batch files with lots of extensions added.

On Fri, Oct 20, 2023 at 6:52 PM Steve Nickolas <usotsuki at buric.co> wrote:

> On Sat, 21 Oct 2023, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
>
> > Something this brings back to mind that I always wonder about with
> > Microsoft and their OS choices: So they went with Windows NT for their
> > kernel, scraped the Windows environment off the top of DOS and dolloped
> > it on top. Has there been any explanation over the years why they also
> > decided to keep the MSDOS CLI interface? It's not like the NT kernel
> > couldn't handle simple stuff like a UNIX-y shell, tools like grep and
> > sed, etc. and Microsoft had code in Xenix they probably could've
> > considered using for that. Was it not wanting to have any licensing
> > questions by avoiding anything that smelled like Xenix at all? Or was
> > the consumer base at the time that invested in the MSDOS environment
> > that handing them a Bourne shell with some ubiquitous UNIX tools
> > would've just been unworkable? Feels like a lost opportunity, they
> > could've had their kernel and their desktop environment and still given
> > folks a more robust CLI. Instead stuff like UWIN, Cygwin, etc. had to
> > come along and fill the void. That was something I was hoping he'd talk
> > about when I clicked, but I didn't catch anything particular about the
> > CLI choice.
>
> They actually inherited the CLI from OS/2, didn't they?
>
> -uso.
>
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