On 17 July 2016 at 19:33, Jerry Kemp <other at oryx.us> wrote:
windows 95 - yea, even bill gates stated that windows
95 was the pinnacle.
Er, what? When?
ease of installation - maybe due to the fact that the
bulk, if not all of us
here are experienced users, I've never understood the belly-aching
concerning installation. Not for DOS/windows, not for OS/2, not for BSD,
not for Linux, not for Solaris.
Then I suspect that you have perhaps not experienced the variety of
systems that the rest of us have.
Specifically when you are giving the
installer the entire disk for the OS as a new system install.
What? Since when? I haven't done that since I first got a work PC!
There's always something new to learn, and there are always more OSes
to explore than space to set up multiple PCs. All my machines
multi-boot. All of them. Even the Macs.
Just grab the
disk then go.
There's a problem, for instance.
Windows -- any version, 3, 9x, NT, whatever:
[a] copy the files to an installation source folder
[b] run the setup program.
So, for NT4, for instance, I set up a whole client's network of
CD-less machines from a Novell server. Install DOS, install the
Netware client. Connect to the server, copy the files to
D:\SETUP\WINNT4. Reboot with no client, but with HIMEM and SMARTDRV.
CD to the folder, run WINNT.EXE. Proceed with installation.
OS/2 couldn't do that. The installer only runs on OS/2. OS/2 has major
problems with device drivers, which must be copied to media that the
bootable installation disk can see and be corrrectly configured in the
1000+ line, unstructured, CONFIG.SYS file.
You have to correctly configure drivers before you can even start the
installation!
BSD: it doesn't properly understand classic PC partitioning. You can't
install into a logical drive in an extended partition. It can only
take a primary partition and install its own weird alien partitioning
system inside that, so you need 2 levels of partitioning -- one at DOS
level, then inside that, one at BSD level.
And so on.
Other settings, like network, even if it is dhcp,
have to be
added somewhere, be it during the install or after the fact.
You fail to spot the much more significant issue of finding a driver
for your network card.
OS/2 vs the windows GUI - sorry, but the best that
anyone is going to be
able to convince me on here is personal preference. Its a GUI on top of the
OS where end users double click icons.
I could give you an illustrated hour-long presentation on the subject,
but there is no point in wasting either of our times on this.
Aside from the single thread input queue on early WPS,
the sole advantage I
ever saw that windows had over OS/2 was that early on, the *.ini files were
text based on windows vs binary on OS/2. At some point, ms followed IBM and
moved to binary *.ini files. I don't remember at what version.
No, it didn't.
Windows INI files are still text-based.
However, INI files are deprecated and most config is now in the
Registry, which is binary. A decent editor is provided but alas it
lacks rich global search-and-replace functionality, for which I use
John Rennie's excellent GREPREGISTRY tool:
http://www.ratsauce.co.uk/winsrc/files.htm
Note that it is a simple command-line based text S&R with no relation
to GREP and its famously opaque syntax. I consider this a major
advantage. Others' MMV.
--
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