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Comment by kpil | Hacker News Reader

-- Those who don't understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. Henry Spencer

This is such a cliché.

Do you think that the people who implemented the Windows Console, especially the people working on Windows NT, did not know about Unix? People try different approaches, sometimes they don't work out.

And it's not like Unix is the Word of God, anyway, it has plenty of flaws.

(Yeah, after a long time on internet forums I get kind of touchy after someone copy-pastes the same old and tired line.)

Microsoft understood Unix very well, Xenix was a product of theirs in the 80’s

Since it took them 20 years to make a half-decent shell and 30 years how to figure out how stdout should work: no they had no clue.

Maybe they knew how a kernel should work though, but weren't the NT guys old VMS guys? That's a totally un-unixy OS actually.

1. They didn't care about command line tools, in many ways (usability) they're a huge regression. After all, it was in the name of the product: Windows.

2. Who says that in-band communication like Unix is doing is necessarily better? See pastejacking and other shenanigans.

It's all about pushing Azure and dedicating resources to said goals

The problem is that in this case it's not understanding Microsoft's own prior software that condemns one to reinvent it. Microsoft's second POSIX subsystem for Windows NT, a.k.a. Interix, had all of this.

Those who did understand unix reinvented it pretty well, called it Plan 9, and were more or less completely ignored by the unix twonks of the world.

Sometimes people just insist on using stuff that sucks.

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