From Wm on Mon, 7 Sep 1998 22:03:39 +0100
I thought this may interest some people here. It certainly amused me. Nice one, Mr Korn! I haven't provided full authorship details as it appears that the article was itself forwarded when I first saw it in the Perl-Win32-Users mail list. === On Mon, 7 Sep 1998 bill.birthisel@jadebbs.com wrote: > It is only really annoying to those who use "one-liners" frequently or > those who use complicated "system" commands. Those people would benefit > from a decent shell anyway. $MS will soon be offering a "Unix lovers" > add-on that includes a varient of the Korn shell (wksh) - but I have not > seen $$$Pricing$$$ and you-know-who needs to cover his losses. But I > find bash is a good complement to perl (and THAT price is right). Here's an interesting little anecdote I just happen to have laying around (thanks Chris...) [Forwarding info removed] I've been attending the USENIX NT and LISA NT (Large Installation Systems Administration for NT) conference in downtown Seattle this week. One of those magical Microsoft moments(tm) happened yesterday and I thought that I'd share. Non-geeks may not find this funny at all, but those in geekdom (particularly UNIX geekdom) will appreciate it. Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager (henceforth MPM), was holding forth on a forthcoming product that will provide Unix style scripting and shell services on NT for compatibility and to leverage UNIX expertise that moves to the NT platform. The product suite includes the MKS (Mortise Kern Systems) windowing Korn shell, a windowing PERL, and lots of goodies like awk, sed and grep. It actually fills a nice niche for which other products (like the MKS suite) have either been too highly priced or not well enough integrated. An older man, probably mid-50s, stands up in the back of the room and asserts that Microsoft could have done better with their choice of Korn shell. He asks if they had considered others that are more compatible with existing UNIX versions of KSH. The MPM said that the MKS shell was pretty compatible and should be able to run all UNIX scripts. The questioner again asserted that the MKS shell was not very compatible and didn't do a lot of things right that are defined in the KSH language spec. The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and should work quite well. This assertion and counter assertion went back and forth for a bit, when another fellow member of the audience announced to the MPM that the questioner was, in fact David Korn of AT&T (now Lucent) Bell Labs. (David Korn is the author of the Korn shell) Uproarious laughter burst forth from the audience, and it was one of the only times that I have seen a (by then pink cheeked) MPM lost for words or momentarily lacking the usual unflappable confidence. So, what's a body to do when Microsoft reality collides with everyone elses? === -- Wm ...Watch out for more...