🚀 go-pugleaf

It's 09 Jul 98  11:54,
We'll return to dale@mpce.mq.edu.au and All's
discussion of Linux and Windows NT...

 da> Isn't Windows NT as much of an operating system as VMS?
 da> After all, didn't a transplanted DEC VMS team write
 da> Windows NT?  I'm told that much of the low level handling
 da> is similar to VMS.  Anybody know more?

I've heard this ine before, but am unable to either confirm or deny
this.

 da> Still, the only thing I don't like about Win NT is that
 da> they left behind the old windows look and usage.  I mean
 da> why would anyone want to go through pop up menus that
 da> cover the whole screen just to load a little used program?
 da> And click the "Start" button to stop???  I wish they had
 da> a Windows 3.11 style compatability mode with a program
 da> manager, similar looks, etc...

I guess it's a matter of preference.  While the "95 style" gui gets in
the way sometimes, I find it less restrictive than the Windows 3.x
interface of NT 3.51.  That was more fiddly in both WFWG and NT 3.51,
IMHO.

 da> I am considering adding Win NT 4.0 before they come up
 da> with some Win NT 98 thingy with automatic Exploder install.
 da> There are a lot of people out there that write neat stuff
 da> for the M$ platforms.  But I will never go Windows 95, 98,
 da> ... , series diverges, ...

I don't use 95 here (or 98 for that matter :) ).  Windows on this box is
NT4, which is OK, but still suffers from some shortcomings:

It's not as stable as advertised, I have a handful of ordinary user apps
guaranteed to either hang the system or give a BSOD. :-(

Networking is a little suspect at times, I find Windows networking code
tends to "hang" the system when things are a bit slow on the wire,
unlike Linux, where even a total session hang (e.g. accessing a NFS hard
mount that just fell off the face of the earth), has little effect on
the rest of the system.  The equivalent NT scenario would bog the system
down (even something as inocuous as trying to pull news from a dead news
server slows things to a crawl).  Still it's not as bad as in 95, where
accessing a just vanished share would often hang the system.

On a similar note, Explorer (i.e. the desktop one, not IE) seems to be
single threaded.  Tie that up, and the rest of the system is hard to
manage. :(

One day at work, the network was acting up so much, 95 kept hanging.  I
ended up giving Windows away for the day and booting my concealed Linux
partition.  That fixed the problem, no more hangs and general carry on.
:)  Then I got something done. :-)

... OS/2? What's that? Half of an Operating System?
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