[Technical] Notebooks for New Staff - DET needs to help

[Con Zymaris]

On Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 10:12:23AM +1100, Clark, Ian C wrote:
> 
> Yes Jim, more than most areas of IT, judgement of a GUI is subjective
> ... look at the wars that used to rage between GNOME and KDE (for
> reasons as much ideological as ergonomic).
> 
> Windows NT had no graphical interface when it was written as a server
> operating system in C. Its creator Dave Cutler is the equivalent of say,
> Linus Torvalds with Linux. Only grumpier - Bill Gates was too scared to
> talk to him, let alone give him orders. 
> 
> Now, one thing Cutler really hates is GUIs. The familiar C++ shell is
> really an afterthought, put on by other people who thought that NT (now
> XP and 2003) could replace 95 as a *desktop* operating system.
> 
> You can experiment on a test machine with changing the "Shell" key at
> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
> from Explorer.exe to something else ... I suppose you could try IE
> itself, or the endless supply of alternative shells such as Litestep,
> Blackbox, Astonshell that most people don't take seriously. Heck, if you
> install Cygwin, you can run KDE.

And as Dave Cutler (who also happened to be the designer of VMS at 
DEC) hated Unix about as much as he hated GUIs, he'd be turning even 
further in his grave, if he in fact were dead ;-)

Cutler's work on VMS and Windows NT [*] were Cutler's attempts at
reimplenting a Unix-like platform, without them being Unix. And that
reminds me of an old pithy quote:

 "Those who don't understand UNIX are doomed to reimplement it. Poorly."

[*] you can right shift the characters from VMS -> WNT ;-)

-- 
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