Satya's blog - MSDOS and UNIX

(MSDOS is probably a trademark of Microsoft, and UNIX is a trademark of AT&T or Bell Labs or something.)

In Andrew Tanenbaum's _Modern Operating Systems_, he says that MSDOS and UNIX are somewhat similar -- I suppose they were, back in the day. He also says that MS was once a distributor of UNIX. WTF?

Two unrelated facts, found on widely-separated pages of a dusty old book, kept on the back shelves on a dark floor of an obscure library, in... The Twilight Zone.

(How's my Rod Serling impression?)

Update: While on that subject, he was talking about system calls for creating and terminating processes, requesting memory, releasing memory, waiting for a process to terminate, and overlaying a program with another one. I realised I know the calls he's talking about -- in C terms, they are: fork(?), kill(?), *alloc, free, waitpid, and exec.

Last updated: Mar 07 2005 19:12