What to Do with a PS/2?

[John Willis]

>
> > Correct me if I'm remembering incorrectly (probably am), but wasn't
> > NT a descendent of DEC VMS?
>
> As I understand it - an important caveat here - Windows NT was to some
> extent a conceptual descendent of VMS, but that was more because the
> same person was instrumental in designing both than because there was
> an explicit inheritance relationship.
>
> That would be Dave Cutler. You can see his philosophy clearly in both
systems.
And he had little respect for Gordon Letwin and the OS/2 architecture, and
open
disdain for UNIX and its underlying stream-of-bytes, everything-is-a-file,
everything-is-plaintext philosophy. IMO, NT offers a better kernel than
OS/2,
but nothing has ever matched the elegance and sheer power of the Workplace
Shell as a graphical abstraction.

Windows overall suffers from layers upon layers of ill-conceived backwards
compatibility hacks and Microsoft's inability to settle on one API, as well
as
horrendously weak versioning of shared libraries (the Component Object Model
is a nightmare). IUnknown, anyone?