On 17 July 2016 at 19:33, Jerry Kemp <ot...@oryx.us> wrote: > windows 95 - yea, even bill gates stated that windows 95 was the pinnacle.
Er, what? When? > ease of installation - maybe due to the fact that the bulk, if not all of us > here are experienced users, I've never understood the belly-aching > concerning installation. Not for DOS/windows, not for OS/2, not for BSD, > not for Linux, not for Solaris. Then I suspect that you have perhaps not experienced the variety of systems that the rest of us have. > Specifically when you are giving the > installer the entire disk for the OS as a new system install. What? Since when? I haven't done that since I first got a work PC! There's always something new to learn, and there are always more OSes to explore than space to set up multiple PCs. All my machines multi-boot. All of them. Even the Macs. > Just grab the > disk then go. There's a problem, for instance. Windows -- any version, 3, 9x, NT, whatever: [a] copy the files to an installation source folder [b] run the setup program. So, for NT4, for instance, I set up a whole client's network of CD-less machines from a Novell server. Install DOS, install the Netware client. Connect to the server, copy the files to D:\SETUP\WINNT4. Reboot with no client, but with HIMEM and SMARTDRV. CD to the folder, run WINNT.EXE. Proceed with installation. OS/2 couldn't do that. The installer only runs on OS/2. OS/2 has major problems with device drivers, which must be copied to media that the bootable installation disk can see and be corrrectly configured in the 1000+ line, unstructured, CONFIG.SYS file. You have to correctly configure drivers before you can even start the installation! BSD: it doesn't properly understand classic PC partitioning. You can't install into a logical drive in an extended partition. It can only take a primary partition and install its own weird alien partitioning system inside that, so you need 2 levels of partitioning -- one at DOS level, then inside that, one at BSD level. And so on. > Other settings, like network, even if it is dhcp, have to be > added somewhere, be it during the install or after the fact. You fail to spot the much more significant issue of finding a driver for your network card. > OS/2 vs the windows GUI - sorry, but the best that anyone is going to be > able to convince me on here is personal preference. Its a GUI on top of the > OS where end users double click icons. I could give you an illustrated hour-long presentation on the subject, but there is no point in wasting either of our times on this. > Aside from the single thread input queue on early WPS, the sole advantage I > ever saw that windows had over OS/2 was that early on, the *.ini files were > text based on windows vs binary on OS/2. At some point, ms followed IBM and > moved to binary *.ini files. I don't remember at what version. No, it didn't. Windows INI files are still text-based. However, INI files are deprecated and most config is now in the Registry, which is binary. A decent editor is provided but alas it lacks rich global search-and-replace functionality, for which I use John Rennie's excellent GREPREGISTRY tool: http://www.ratsauce.co.uk/winsrc/files.htm Note that it is a simple command-line based text S&R with no relation to GREP and its famously opaque syntax. I consider this a major advantage. Others' MMV. -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)