[Tutor] slashes in paths

[Marc Tompkins]

On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 4:37 PM, Jim Mooney <cybervigilante at gmail.com>wrote:


> If only Bill Gates hadn't chosen '\', which is awkward to type and
> hard to make compatible - but I think he figured his wonderful DOS
> would be a Unix-killer, reign supreme, and there would be no
> compatibility problem. All I can say to that is, "thank God for
> competition."  ;')
>

I've run across this many times before - the idea that Gates saw UNIX off
in the distance as his great competitor.  It just isn't true.  Digital
Research's CP/M (the first OS I had hands-on experience with) was the
1,000-pound gorilla in the nascent PC market; DOS was consciously designed
to be an easy transition from CP/M both for users and programmers.  (This
was not done out of the goodness of Microsoft's heart, of course - it was a
way to poach the CP/M customer base, and it worked like a charm.  WordStar
- the most popular word processor for CP/M, and up to that point the
top-selling application in the world - was famously ported over by changing
a single byte, though - equally famously - nobody remembers what that byte
was.  http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000054.html)

UNIX was in an entirely separate universe, and furthermore UNIX didn't need
Bill Gates' help to kill itself - AT&T's ridiculous licensing arrangements
were doing that job quite nicely.  No way in Hell was UNIX ever going to be
a successful, popular desktop operating system for the masses, as DOS ended
up being.  If it weren't for a brilliant, profane Finno-Swede (or is that
Swedo-Finn?) named Linus Torvalds, UNIX would probably be an academic
footnote by now.  Yes, I'm aware that plenty of big iron still runs various
flavors of actual UNIX, and I'm equally aware that the Internet predates
Linux... but if it weren't for the commercial Internet, which is mostly
powered by Linux, very few of us would be able to access that big iron and
the Internet would be reserved for academics, the military, and the filthy
rich.

But back in the late 1970s, no way in Hell did Gates see Linux on the
horizon.  He saw CP/M, and the choices that he (and MS in general) made at
that time were intended to be compatible with CP/M, not incompatible with
UNIX.  You wanna blame somebody, blame Gary Kildall.
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