[vox-tech] How X, Gnome, Sawfish, Nautilus relate (Was re: Pardon me, but...)

[vox-tech@lists.lugod.org]

More specifically.

The Win 3.x defininatly ran on DOS.  

The Win9x series, including that price gouging excuse
for an upgrade WinME, was a GUI on DOS and ran on DOS
7.  The whole was a mis-match of 16/32 bit stuff and
had horible memory management and it was generally best
practise to reload the system from scratch at least
once a year if you loaded sw (games) on a regular basis
to avoid excessive system instabillities.

The Windows NT line descends from VMS.  The NT line has
both COMMAND, a 16 bit emulator for backward
compatibilty, and CMD, a 32 bit command line shell. 
After much hue and cry, the Windows 2000 actually
extended the scripting abilities of the Win2K cmd shell
quite a bit.  However, they promote Visual Basic as the
script language of choice for Win2K and though you can
use cmd, perl, php, whatever, MS strongly encourages VB
in docs so as to tie people to propriatery sw even
further.

Win2K, configured properly, will boot to a cmdcons (cmd
Console) but this is really for emergency use and is
generally only to get the system back up, which means
you are tied to the GUI and all the resources that
entails.  

The problem results in admins and users who do not know
any scripting as you can do stuff with the GUI
manually.  Doing everything manually increases the
workload, therefore some people buy third party tools
to automate stuff at an even greater expense.

End result is that most NT sys admins don't know
scripting at all nor are they ever exposed to it unless
they work in an Enterprise environment or do a lot of
reading.

With the upcoming MS licensing changes finally
arriving, I suspect that this will be traced to the
starting point that finally generates the necessary
Linux installed infrastructure in small businesses that
drives wide spread adoption and creates the larger
experianced technician base necessary for support and
across the board adoption of Linux in larger comapnies.

-sp

Richard Crawford wrote

> 
> Thanks to all for your explanations!  I think I grasp
it now.
> 
> The older versions of Windows really were just
containers for DOS, a
> fancy version of DOSSHELL.  I believe it was version
3.0 of Windows when
> Microsoft decided that users really didn't need to
know anything but the
> GUI; by Windows 2000, of course, DOS had been
completely emasculated,
> and Windows is now nothing but GUI.  Which is a
shame.  I personally
> really like just digging around inside the command
line from time to
> time and seeing what I can pull off.
> 
> But, anyway...  Thanks to everyone who helped me
figure this out.  I
> appreciate it.  :)