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Comment by throwawayish | Hacker News Reader

This is legacy built on legacy built to work with minimal CPU cycles on existing hardware designed to be compatible with hardware from the 40s.

Yes, concerns aren't separated ;)

A much more recent and far superior design can be found in Windows NT, where things like coloring are done entirely through an ioctl-equivalent (whereas Unix has amounts of in-band signaling, while some later extension use tty_ioctl).

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  > Unix has amounts of in-band signaling

The in-band signalling is not a Unix thing; it's a widely-supported international standard ISO 6429 aka ANSI X3.64 aka ECMA-48.

ioctls are terrible. I've never used the "Windows NT design" but how would they implement e.g. tunnelling through SSH or a serial connection?

Yet the Windows command line is barely usable, with the horrible support of unicode and the unbearable performance.

That's because Microsoft took over the entire world of computing by selling easy to use GUI tools instead of command line tools.

nah, what they did was a masterstroke of contract work that allowed them to be the de-facto compatibility layer for every two bit IBM PC clone out there. The rest is history.

Pffft, it takes a lot more than a contract to maintain an empire the size of Microsoft.

Their tech beats OSS in many areas and there is definitely a reason that people continually pay to use it.

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