[TUHS] Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!

[Michael Kjörling]

On 4 Feb 2019 09:07 +1100, from dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall):
> My vague (and rough) recollection is CP/M -> DOS -> Windows.

CP/M is (was?) to MS-DOS roughly as UNIX is to Linux (the overall
system, not referring to just the kernel); a source of inspiration,
but not a direct ancestor. Then let's not get into the Windows / OS/2
/ Windows NT confusion, product line splits/merges and rebranding.
IIRC, at least until Windows 3.0 (1990), and possibly until Windows 95
when Microsoft did their best to hide the troubled history, Windows
applications were _expected_ to ultimately rely on the old-style
MS-DOS API for basic operating system services like file management,
and could choose to (or were expected to) call those APIs directly
instead of going through the Windows API. For a long time, Windows was
just a fancy (some would almost certainly say overrated) graphical
shell.

I, too, would like to see some reference or at least justification for
the claim that Microsoft would not have created Windows had it not
been for Unix. As I recall, Visi On did use some Unix as its
development platform; and Microsoft Windows was created in response to
Visi On; but that's the only obvious causal connection between Unix
and Windows that I can see, and it's a tenuous one at best.

-- 
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se
  “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person
              is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor)