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.
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.

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.

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

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

The problem with all of these "rip off" histories is they are not necessarily credible.

What we do have in history are records of deliberate developments of languages which are the only concrete measures.

That would be simple were it not for the fact that good ideas within languages migrate faster than a windows virus. And as soon as developers play musical chairs on jobs the better ways to implement the ideas migrate.

After a while they all tend to look like each other to some degree.

Before the the IBM unitary hardware/software purchase was broken up the idea of porting something, much less an OS didn't exist. The basic variants of OSs we have were designed to make new hardware designs work else they could not be sold. Changing designs permitted by advanced hardware permitted major changes in how the OS functioned. Going from teletype and papertape to CRT was a major change. Mag tape to hard drives (back at the mainframe) were a major change. Pick other significant hardware advances and you find similare OS changes required to take advantage of them.

As all computers make use of the same hardware improvements they all have related OS parts that deal with them. And then there is the suit who sees some competitor's neat trick and orders 'make ours look like that only better.'

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