Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!labrea!polya!shap
From: shap@polya.Stanford.EDU (Jonathan S. Shapiro)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Op Environment vs Op System (was: NeXT not revolutionary enough?)
Message-ID: <4833@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 3 Nov 88 07:44:41 GMT
References: <471@wucs1.wustl.edu> <48@necbsd.NEC.COM> <26446@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Reply-To: shap@polya.Stanford.EDU (Jonathan S. Shapiro)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 22

In article <26446@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
schanck@saturn.cis.ohio-state.edu (Christopher Schanck) writes
(quoting BYTE):
>... People have a tendency to confuse the *environment* with the operating
>system.

Some of the readers of this newsgroup are too young to remember *why*
this is so, and there is a simple reason.  Few popularly available
operating systems (I don't think multics counts - I am interested in
thousands of copies sold) before UNIX made a strong distinction
between the command processor and the operating system.
Traditionally, the command processor is considered part of the
operating system implementation.  Since the command processor is the
dominant interface to most users (EMACS users can hit N now), the
assertion that most *operating systems* are text-based is not so
unreasonable.

For examples, consider VMS, MVS, VM/CMS, DOS, OS/2, and on and on.
UNIX is the first operating system of commerical import to distinguish
between the operating system and the [user] environment.

Jon