this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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To be fair, Window$ has been bloat since the very day M$ stole it from its Unix roots, and Linux is everything that the OS could've been were it not run by money-grubbin' cringelords.
Unix roots? Lol wtf
Why wtf?
Microsoft started as a UNIX-based programming company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
Hell you see remnants of it in the reserved filename list.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/naming-a-file?redirectedfrom=MSDN
Devices in windows are not typically "files" like they are in unix/linux... So why CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM0, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, COM¹, COM², COM³, LPT0, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, LPT9, LPT¹, LPT², and LPT³ are all reserved? Because they maintained compatibility with features businesses used at the time... and never deprecated the function.
Edit:
Why are we downvoting literal computer history? It is a known fact that Windows started on Unix systems. It's a known fact that they released their own BSD-based software up to and including a full fledged Unix-based OS, and it's a known fact that MS-DOS 1 and 2 were both Unix compatible. This is LITERALLY the definition of "roots". Are we so touchy here that we can't acknowledge actual computing history?
Hmm, I always thought MS was founded to steal/modify MS DOS. Interesting that they briefly did Unix stuff, but I still take issue with the way op phrased it. "Their Unix roots" makes it sound like they were heavily invested in Unix and carried that forward even into windows. I don't know if they used any of that code in windows, but if they did you'd never know it by using dos or any windows version I've seen. Even despite both having command line interfaces, almost everything is different from Unix except the command "cd", to my recollection.
“Started as”
Yeah, no. Yes Xenix was a thing but it would be incorrect to say that it ever was their main product.
I don’t think anyone has ever hinted on that NT has a unix code base except for some “borrowed” networking code from bsd.
They made several full versions of it... It was not simply a one off product.
Also,
So they were simultaneously created AND interoperable (from a program development perspective). This was a full fledged item.
Edit: to elaborate a little better. If they were simultaneously developed... and interoperable. And one item is Unix-based outright. Then it's safe to say that the other item (MS-DOS) in this case is also pretty steeped in Unix roots.
Sounds like an ageist to me. As far as I knew, Microsoft's first product was msdos but I guess I'm just too unintelligent and "young" (lol) to know better
Windows doesn't have any Unix roots. MS built MS-DOS from QDOS, a clone-port of CP/M, which comes from PDP mainframe software. Windows was written mostly from scratch to run on top of MS-DOS, and was influenced by Visicorp and Apple's GUIs.
And modern desktop Linux isn't a good example of an alternative. It's much more fiddly and less polished than Windows (though Windows 10 and 11 have not been as polished as 7). Even Mac OS is more polished, and does have true Unix roots (via BSD), though it does have a lot of the Apple "fisher-price" product design.