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

[Clark, Ian C]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: tech-bounces at edulists.com.au 
> [mailto:tech-bounces at edulists.com.au] On Behalf Of Con Zymaris 
>
> OS/360 has few visible influences nowdays outside mainframes.

You are mistaking the word "influential" for "dominant".

"Influential" doesn't mean "top dog right now", it means "the top dogs
now were shaped by it".

It was the most important OS of its day, because it ran across a whole
family of upgradable mainframes, suiting companies of different sizes.
We take that scalability now for granted.


> The Xerox Alto was influential primarily for its desktop 
> interface and hardware input/output, not its underlying OS.

As Mac and Windoze users gratefully acknowledge, the OS *was* also the
WYSIWYG desktop, the GUI, the networking, the output to the first laser
printers. The Netware IPX/SPX protocols are almost unchanged from the
original Xerox design. Where would LDAP be without the pioneering work
of Xerox's Grapevine?  

> > Directory from it), VMS (favouring a distributed model of computing 
> > across peers, rather than the traditional server-client 
> relationship).
> > 
> > Even Linux is more directly influenced by Tanenbaum's MINIX 
> than Unix
> 
> And what influenced MINIX, pray tell? ;-)

Now you're going round in circles, Con ... 

Multics may have been the grandmother of Minix, but we've said enough
now to show that we can't take seriously your two quotes: "Multics ...
the 'idea' mother of most modern Oses", and "Those who don't understand
UNIX are doomed to reimplement it. Poorly".

Cheers,
Clarky


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