I must admit, I've never used an ICL box, but I was a big fan of VAX-VMS and the DCL shell.
However, even so, I'd have to say that the modern Linux shell is an awful lot more capable. I don't _like_ it as much, but I will readily concede it's more powerful.
And yes, I *am* including external commands. :-)
In a way, yes, I think you're right about choice. Less often *is* more.
What I find interesting is that a decade after Windows 95 basically redefined the desktop GUI - even Mac OS X takes some concepts from it (although fewer than anything else, being as it is a jazzed-up modern version of one of the only surviving desktop GUI OSes that _predates_ Win95) - the iPhone came along and completely displaced WIMP desktops for over a billion people.
Android is basically a rip-off of iOS, of course - hastily revamped from its previous look and feel as a rip-off of the Blackberry OS.
Smartphones led to tablets and led to bigger shifts in the Windows UI than 20 years of incremental development had.
This shows that people _will_ shift if you give them a good enough reason.
When I was at college, the computing department had just got some bug beefy VAXes for students to use (BSD Unix) and they were considered the bees knees. Also got to try out VMS on microvaxes - again, in retrospect I wish I could have learned more about VMS.
These days, the VAX ISA appears to be considered as an prime example of going 'over the top' and something that could never seriously be implemented using modern cpu techniques. But VMS seems to live on - it is currently being ported to x86 and looks like the company doing it will honour the spirit of DEC in having a free hobbyist programme for it.
You’re right about the shift in GUIs for mobile devices. In the case of iOS, I’ve never been sure how much it differs from OS X for the programmer (not having done MacOS/iOS development). At least Apple avoided the pitfall of trying to push too much of the mobile gui onto the desktop; MS found that one out the hard way.
This had a very good UI, IMHO. What killed it was that MS replaced Windows Mobile (CE-based) with Windows Phone (with the same UI, but based on the NT kernel). The snag being that although Windows Phone _looked_ almost identical, it was an entirely different, incompatible OS.
Almost no Windows Mobile devices could be upgraded to Windows Phone. All app development, what relatively little there was, switched to the new OS so the old one was left stranded high and dry. People with expensive new high-end Windows Mobile smartphones couldn't get updates, and were understandably aggrieved.
Windows Phone was better in some ways. It was finally part of the main OS family, so should have got more, and more regular, updates... and desktop apps, if the vendor ported them to ARM. You could connect a screen and a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, without extra hardware, and get a desktop-like experience. Or you could, in principle, use your phone docked into a bigger display as your tablet, or docked into a laptop-like body as your main laptop, or in a desktop dock as your PC.
Just like MS did with NT 25 years earlier, it anticipated the next generation of hardware, when phones would get so much CPU, RAM and storage that they were perfectly able to perform desktop duties.
It was a good OS, a good UI, and should have succeeded, but it alienated all the existing users and therefore effectively rebooted the MS phone/tablet offering just at the point when the iOS/Android duopoly grew really strong.
(Some of the same comments apply to Blackberry 10, too. Excellent OS, great user experience, good hardware, and should have succeeded.)
Both MS and Blackberry abandoned these markets too soon, IMHO, but both saw a long hard expensive fight ahead and cut their losses. Sad but pragmatic.
I must admit, I've never used an ICL box, but I was a big fan of VAX-VMS and the DCL shell.
However, even so, I'd have to say that the modern Linux shell is an awful lot more capable. I don't _like_ it as much, but I will readily concede it's more powerful.
And yes, I *am* including external commands. :-)
In a way, yes, I think you're right about choice. Less often *is* more.
What I find interesting is that a decade after Windows 95 basically redefined the desktop GUI - even Mac OS X takes some concepts from it (although fewer than anything else, being as it is a jazzed-up modern version of one of the only surviving desktop GUI OSes that _predates_ Win95) - the iPhone came along and completely displaced WIMP desktops for over a billion people.
Android is basically a rip-off of iOS, of course - hastily revamped from its previous look and feel as a rip-off of the Blackberry OS.
Smartphones led to tablets and led to bigger shifts in the Windows UI than 20 years of incremental development had.
This shows that people _will_ shift if you give them a good enough reason.
Reply
When I was at college, the computing department had just got some bug beefy VAXes for students to use (BSD Unix) and they were considered the bees knees. Also got to try out VMS on microvaxes - again, in retrospect I wish I could have learned more about VMS.
These days, the VAX ISA appears to be considered as an prime example of going 'over the top' and something that could never seriously be implemented using modern cpu techniques. But VMS seems to live on - it is currently being ported to x86 and looks like the company doing it will honour the spirit of DEC in having a free hobbyist programme for it.
You’re right about the shift in GUIs for mobile devices. In the case of iOS, I’ve never been sure how much it differs from OS X for the programmer (not having done MacOS/iOS development). At least Apple avoided the pitfall of trying to push too much of the mobile gui onto the desktop; MS found that one out the hard way.
Reply
I never used a Unix VAX, only VMS. But someone _is_ doing a modern hardware VAX implementation on FPGA, which is what kicked all this off.
iOS' UI is called Springboard and it is basically the Mac OS X "Dashboard" as the main UI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashboard_(macOS)
Introduced in 10.4, removed after 10.14. I really liked it at the time, but I found I almost never used it in real life.
Windows CE did indeed have a version of the desktop Windows UI, and was indeed rather poor... but it evolved into Windows Mobile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile
This had a very good UI, IMHO. What killed it was that MS replaced Windows Mobile (CE-based) with Windows Phone (with the same UI, but based on the NT kernel). The snag being that although Windows Phone _looked_ almost identical, it was an entirely different, incompatible OS.
Almost no Windows Mobile devices could be upgraded to Windows Phone. All app development, what relatively little there was, switched to the new OS so the old one was left stranded high and dry. People with expensive new high-end Windows Mobile smartphones couldn't get updates, and were understandably aggrieved.
Windows Phone was better in some ways. It was finally part of the main OS family, so should have got more, and more regular, updates... and desktop apps, if the vendor ported them to ARM. You could connect a screen and a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, without extra hardware, and get a desktop-like experience. Or you could, in principle, use your phone docked into a bigger display as your tablet, or docked into a laptop-like body as your main laptop, or in a desktop dock as your PC.
Just like MS did with NT 25 years earlier, it anticipated the next generation of hardware, when phones would get so much CPU, RAM and storage that they were perfectly able to perform desktop duties.
It was a good OS, a good UI, and should have succeeded, but it alienated all the existing users and therefore effectively rebooted the MS phone/tablet offering just at the point when the iOS/Android duopoly grew really strong.
(Some of the same comments apply to Blackberry 10, too. Excellent OS, great user experience, good hardware, and should have succeeded.)
Both MS and Blackberry abandoned these markets too soon, IMHO, but both saw a long hard expensive fight ahead and cut their losses. Sad but pragmatic.
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I still have a Windows phone, but support for it was discontinued many moons ago. Might have to look up some of the features you mentioned.
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