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[-] SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 14 points 1 month ago

The thing is, a lot of the legacy backwards compatible stuff that's in Linux is because a lot of things in Unix were actually pretty well thought out from the get go, unlike many of the ugly hacks that went into MSDOS and later Windows and overstayed their welcome.

Things like: long case sensitive file names from the beginning instead of forced uppercase 8.3 , a hierarchical filesystem instead of drive letters, "everything is a file" concept, a notion of multiple users and permissions, pre-emptive multitasking, proper virtual memory management instead of a "640k is enough" + XMS + EMS, and so on.

[-] BCsven@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 month ago

It still amazes me how well thought out unix was for the era when computing was in its infancy. But I guess that is what you get with computer science nerds from Universities and a budget for development based on making a product the goal, not quarterly profit the goal.

[-] superkret@feddit.org 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

It's what you get when you design an OS for a mainframe computer that is accessed by many users sharing its resources.
DOS was designed for single-user PC's with very limited processing power, memory and storage, and no access to networked drives. Lots of its hacks and limitations saved a few hundred bytes of memory, which was crucial at the time.

[-] BCsven@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 month ago

I guess i was meaning compared to DOS but modern Windows, where stupid stuff is broken, and they care more about ads than creating a clean OS

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this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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