Re: Why complicated directory structure in Linux

Chris F Clark wrote:
mydejamail@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:

I did not slag it, I simply wanted to understand the rationale for
having 3 bin, usr, lib, etc directories. You also forget that Windows
originated in the main as a single user system and a lot of the design
considerations applying to Unix never got to bear on it.

Just some minor corrections.

1) DOS is a descendent, at least indirectly, from Unix. The original
DOS was written to be like CP/M which was written to be like Unix.

I think you will find that CP/M is basically a ripoff of an INTEL operating system used in their in circuit emulators.

But the reality is that people doing operating systems all cribbed iff each other anyway.

The main thing about DOS/CPM/Intel80 was the use of letters and colons to designate floppy drives IIRC.

Whereas Unix was descended from the era of removable hard drives that had to be explicitly 'mounted'

I.e. CPM/DOS and latterly windoze are derived from microcomputer OS'es that started life on things like emulators, whereas Unix is descended from mainframe stuff adapted down for minicomputers. Which is why removable mountable large disks, multiuser multitasking capability and security was in Unix from the start..Windows and its ancestors never pretended to be more than a single user singe tasking operating system.



There are some bizarrenesses, like why they chose the opposite
slash character for directory separators, but in many ways DOS
looks a lot like a quick-and-dirty Unix knock-off.


No. Check the history of Gary Kildalls career.

DOS had other progentiors also. I think the 3 character file
suffixes (extensions) are a "VMSism" in the sense that DEC OSes of
the time tended to use 3 character file extensions rather than
single letter ones.

No, it was an Intelism

Windows is, of course, a MAC knock-off, where MACs now use a
Unix-style kernel in OS-X.

Both ripped of the Xerox stuff..which started life on an entirely different platfor, IIRC.


2) Unix was also originally single something, as in the quote "Unix is
one of what Multics is many of".

You got that right, at least.
.

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