Most Important Operating System Ever

<p><a href="https://www.thurrott.com/forums/general-discussion/linux/thread/most-important-operating-system-ever#499596&quot; target="_blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><em>In reply to wright_is:</em></a></p><p>DCL plays no noticeable role in Windows. All the VMS influence is behind the scenes.</p><p>I never used any DEC systems unless they were running BSD. Unix had definite advantages over IBM mainframe OSes, though if one got very familiar with CLIST one could do a lot of interesting things not least getting closer to here-documents in scripts than what Windows's CMD supports. While I never used VM / CMS much, but I know a few very (overly?) serious REXX scripters who still use it for all their own scripting. There are a few REXX interpreters for most OSes. Are there any DCL for Windows interpreters?</p><p>In any case, was it Unix itself so much or Bell Labs followed by UC Berkeley which really made Unix what it and its descendants have become? That is, was it the tools-based approach and lots of very intelligent and clever people making lots of different tools?</p><p>[ADDED: I had to add spaces on both sides of the / and remove dot-EXE following CMD to be able to post this.]</p>

<p><a href="https://www.thurrott.com/forums/general-discussion/linux/thread/most-important-operating-system-ever#499995&quot; target="_blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><em>In reply to ErichK:</em></a></p><p>You would have had to have used IBM mainframes running DOS/360 and programming with PL/I to appreciate the full beauty of early Unix and C minimalism. Besides, on old serial terminals using 110 baud modems, as few characters as possible was very desirable.</p><p><em>Stayed in the computer lab.</em> You do know Unix was originally developed by/at Bell Labs? You do know that Bell Labs/AT&amp;T came up with the first electronic typesetting system using troff running under Unix? You do have some idea of the practical value of electronic typesetting to a company filing as many patent applications and technical specs as AT&amp;T? Or perhaps not.</p>

<p><a href="https://www.thurrott.com/forums/general-discussion/linux/thread/most-important-operating-system-ever#501476&quot; target="_blank"><em>In reply to Ezzy:</em></a></p><p>Picky, but Windows 3.x like its predecessors was just a GUI environment running on top of MS-DOS. Yes, it changed computing for most people in OECD countries.</p><p>OTOH, there are more smartphones in use today than PCs, and given the generally shorter lifetimes of phones, either there have been more smartphones than PCs used going back to their relative beginnings, or smartphones will pass PCs soon. Unlike PCs, smartphones are used in all countries in all economic strata except the very poorest. It's smartphones which have brought computing of a sort to all people, not PCs.</p><p>FWIW, all exempt employees in damn near all financial services companies in OECD countries had PCs on their desks before Windows 3.1. Windows 3.1 brought simplified computing to home users and simplified existing PCs in the workplace.</p><p>As for Linux, it's greatest contribution was driving a stake through the heart of proprietary Unix versions. Before Linux, major workstation and server vendors ran different, not always compatible, flavors of Unix or BSD. Linux being FOSS under the GNU License (as opposed to BSD) along with GNU's POSIX tools gave anyone who wanted it the same source code base. True uniformity across vendors. Red Hat, SuSE, Debian, Slackware, Caldera, etc all could run the same binaries built for a given processor architecture. It sure helped that Linux was cost-free, but its main advantage was that anyone &amp; everyone could use the same foundation.</p>

<p><a href="https://www.thurrott.com/forums/general-discussion/linux/thread/most-important-operating-system-ever#502060&quot; target="_blank"><em>In reply to Ezzy:</em></a></p><blockquote>Command lines were technical, scary things for those people.</blockquote><p>Which is why by the late 1980s 90-95% of people with PCs on their desks used batchfile-driven menu systems to run a wordprocessor, spreadsheet, mainframe terminal emulator, and maybe one or two other applications like dBase, presentation software, accounting packages. People welcomed those at work because they made many common tasks take a helluva lot less time than the old paper, pencil and paper roll calculator approach to doing most numbers-based desk work.</p><p>Once application software was up &amp; running, I doubt most people in 1992 found Excel 4 appreciably easier to use that Lotus 1-2-3, or Word much easier than WordPerfect (and definitely not as easy as PFS:Write).</p>

<p><a href="https://www.thurrott.com/forums/general-discussion/linux/thread/most-important-operating-system-ever#503395&quot; target="_blank"><em>In reply to hrlngrv:</em></a></p><p>Reply threading is FUBAR at the moment.</p>