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by shn 5358 days ago
We would all be living in Windows (DOS?) hell. :)

Early in my career I was lucky to use Unix System V. I found those voluminous unix manuals so natural. I could find anything came to my mind less than a minute. Unix system was so coherent, so intuitive. I still enjoy unix prompt, shell to this day.

His book "The C Programming Language" has been the best language book I have ever read. So succinct, but so rewarding for those who studied diligently. Such a beautiful book. I always took that thin book as a standard to compare all the technical books I encountered. If it is that fat I thought there must be something wrong with either the book or the subject of it.

In a broader context:

There was this article recently about Steve Jobs. In that it said somewhere around 90 billion passed through this life and only a few could be able to find his/her voice. Many died before his full potential could even be recognized by themselves. I wonder what would world look like if those could fulfill their talent to their maturity. Because not all societies of the past allowed such liberty for many.
2 comments
crag 5358 days ago
Actually I'm not so sure about that. There was much debate at the time (when Windows 3.11 was everywhere) whether it was a subset of UNIX.

At the very least, it was inspired by UNIX.

Where would we be? Probably all running VMS (which by the way runs on PC's). Or maybe WangVS or something owned by CA now.

//edited for typos

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4ad 5358 days ago
VMS was a a reaction to UNIX, I'm not sure how different DEC's operating systems would have looked if UNIX did not exist.

VMS runs on ALPHA and ITANIUM systems, it doesn't run on anything that vaguely qualifies as a PC, unless you think Windows NT is a VMS variant. It's certainly influenced by VMS, but I say it's a different product.

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bitops 5358 days ago
CA - where software goes to die. (Besides Erwin).
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orblivion 5358 days ago
> We would all be living in Windows (DOS?) hell. :)

Would they program Windows in Pascal?

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crag 5358 days ago
When I went to school, they taught using Pascal. Then you moved to C. Now I think it's just Java?
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