Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!eecae!netnews.upenn.edu!eniac.seas.upenn.edu!jes From: jes@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Joe Smith) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: MKS Idea Keywords: MKS with MSC Message-ID: <6184@netnews.upenn.edu> Date: 15 Nov 88 03:31:18 GMT References: <4994@whuts.UUCP> <7501@dasys1.UUCP> <546@mks.UUCP> <1396@stiatl.UUCP> <4255@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM> Sender: news@netnews.upenn.edu Reply-To: jes@eniac.seas.upenn.edu.UUCP (Joe Smith) Organization: University of Pennsylvania Lines: 74 In article <4255@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM> keithe@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM (Keith Ericson) writes: >In article <1396@stiatl.UUCP> john@stiatl.UUCP (John DeArmond) writes: >>I've been watching this discussion on the various incompatibilities with >>DOS and MKS and the thought just struck me. Why does not Mortise Kern >>go ahead and turn MKS into a standalone OS? Hmmmmm... You guys already >>have about 80% of it done with the shell and utilities. Why not put together >>a nice little multitasking, single user kernel to run below the shell. >> >Without a doubt one of the best ideas ever to come down usenet! ^^^^ - read worst >And do a "tar" while you're at it, eh? ^^^ - get John Gilmore's Gnu tar, it runs will on MS-DOS and with the MKS shell you can do things like tar cvf - dirname | compress -c > filename in a more elegant way. The reason why the MKS-DOS is a bad idea is: 1) The reason most of us like MKS is, it allows us to pretend that we have a rational machine under our fingertips. 2) The reason MKS is successful is in part because they have brought us a large number of Un*x tools and a shell that works. If you want more why not get the real thing. It is available and even runs with fair performance on 286s and 386s. 3) It has taken Microsoft years of fiddling to get OS2 to the point where it is slow and cumbersome. Oh, and not just years, but many many man hours. So, why take away from the standardization which may eventually come from sysV Un*x by inventing yet another multitasking os. 4) Besides, you can remove all the passwds from a personal un*x machine except your own, and no one will accuse you of having a multiuser-multitasking system. It would only be multiuser if you wanted it to be. So, I have an asbestos suit ready for anyone who wishs to argue this point more. But lets give a good thing (unix) a fair chance. It is a lot better than MS-DOS can ever by as far as productivity tools are considered, and graphical interfaces are going to blow the OS/2 presentation manager out of the water. I have been a dedicated MKS user for several years, and this product has been a god send to MS-DOS computing, but the answer is not to rebuild un*x, but to buy the un*x that exsists and put it on hardware that will run it. Frank Kolakowski ____________________________________________________________________________ |c/o jes@eniac.seas.upenn.edu || Univ. of Penna. | |kolakowski%c.chem.upenn.edu@relay.upenn.edu || Dept of Chemistry | |bcooperman.kolakowski@bionet-20.arpa || 231 South 34th St. | |AT&T: 1-215-898-2927 || Phila, PA 19104 | ============================================================================= Joe Smith jes@eniac.seas.upenn.edu University of Pennsylvania Department of Chemistry 231 S. 34th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104 (215) 898-4797