Your opinions?

[Alex Snow]

one thing I find cool about *nix os's is their command structure 
hasn't changed in the 30 or so years it's been around. I recently 
obtained v1 unix for the pdp11 and 2.79bsd also for the pdp11, fired 
up a pdp11 emulator and found that I could use these unices with not 
many differences. the only major difference in commands I saw was in 
v1 unix the command to change directories is chdir not cd.
On Sun, Nov 
30, 2003 at 06:14:40AM -0500, Janina Sajka wrote:
> I agree with Geoff. In fact, not only do I think console apps won't go
> away, I'm quite sure that the competition from the northwest corner of
> the U.S. is going to help make the command line sexy again in its next
> major release, currently named Longhorn (or was that Leghorn?)! Yes, my
> friends, I have it on very good authority that Microsoft is "bringing
> back the command line." I put that in quotes because it is a quotation,
> and because it's a strange statement--as if CLI ever really went away.
> But then Microsoft people tend to see the universe only in their own
> terms.
> 
> I'll even go one better. It's going to become easier to create different
> interfaces to the same underlying application. Much of the
> standardization activity currently underway in groups like FSG and the
> W3C is about facilitating middle layers to make it easier to repurpose
> interfaces for different devices. We can already see some of the early
> efforts in this direction with apps like charva and the textual
> interface to GNOME whose name I'm forgetting at the moment.
> 
> Geoff Shang writes:
> > From: Geoff Shang <gshang at pacific.net.au>
> > 
> > Hi:
> > 
> > I don't think we really have much to worry about.  Yes, console-mode aps do
> > tend to lag a little, particularly in some areas (can anyone say audio
> > editing?), but a lot of people who write applications prefer to use the
> > text console and, as long as that continues to be the case, applications
> > will continue to be written for it.  The big difference between the
> > DOS/Windows comparison and the console/X comparison under Linux, is the
> > fact that in LInux, it really is just a matter of a different interface.
> > With windows, DOS had fairly severe limits which were difficult to
> > overcome.  It also had no fascility for multitasking (many would say that
> > Windows doesn't either, but it at least looks as if it does).  It's also
> > not easy to use the same or similar code for both.  In Linux, the
> > underlying code can be the same, you just slap a new interface on it.
> > People who do this often write their functionality into libs, which makes
> > it completely UI independent.
> > 
> > I think the main problem with web browsers in particular is that most of
> > them have their origins bak in the days when the web was simple and
> > client-side processing wasn't even thought of.  I think if anyone was to
> > write a text-mode web browser these days, they'd do it in such a way that
> > it would incorporate a document object model and allow for client-side
> > applications such as scripting and applets.  The UI is more an indicator of
> > the age of some of these aps than anything else.  I first saw lynx in 1994
> > and it was version 2.3 then.  And I know PIne was at 3.89 in 1994, so it's
> > not exactly new either.
> > 
> > Geoff.
> > 
> > 
> > 
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> 
> -- 
> 	
> Janina Sajka
> Email: janina at rednote.net		
> Phone: (202) 408-8175
> 
> Director, Technology Research and Development
> American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)
> http://www.afb.org
> 
> Chair, Accessibility Work Group
> Free Standards Group
> http://accessibility.freestandards.org
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
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