> Ah. OK.  I was looking at AmigaOS as the software and how you interface 
> to the operating system.  I wasn't looking at AmigaOS as the 
> command-line commands that come with AmigaOS.

I was talking specifically about scripting. ;-) [The whole "batch files 
were everything" trip mentioned further up.]

The API for manipulating processes and RAM and GUI resources and such is 
NOTHING LIKE any kind of Unix I'm aware of.

> I mean, really, CP/M had "more" and "type" and such.

I have no idea what CP/M is.

>> Now I would suspect that would tend to break horribly as soon as some 
>> new application is added that expects everything to be in the normal 
>> locations...
> 
> That would be where the symlinks come into it. :-)

Doesn't that just mean you have two filesystems instead of one?

>> [Basically I have absolutely no clue how the traditional Unix file 
>> layout is supposed to work. I don't know why, for example, we have 
>> /bin, /root/bin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/share/bin...]
> 
> Legacy, and the fact that way too many programs hard-coded file paths 
> instead of the OS doing something like providing APIs for finding out 
> such stuff or having some efficient central storage like a registry. Of 
> course, the #! syntax *requires* hard-coded paths in every file, so it's 
> kind of difficult to improve easily in that sense.

...so basically, Unix has more backwards compatibility than an Intel 
Core 2 Duo?

[That's SAYING something BTW!]

> Nowadays, it looks like this, mostly:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_hierarchy_standard
> 
>> They had trouble. Somebody walked past and the T-adaptor on their PC 
>> fell apart, breaking the ring. 
> 
> They set up the ring wrong, then. :-)  Each loop is supposed to go back 
> to the hub that detects a broken connection and bypasses it.


Hey, it's a county council. You expect them to understand computers?

The fun part was the room full of - I am not kidding! - brown terminals 
with green screens. You press a key, and there's a 2-second delay before 
the character appears on screen. You type in meaningless gibberish such 
as "TN XCOL 3553" and suddenly the huge line printer next to you springs 
into life and starts printing people's benefits cheques or something. 
Only one wizaned old lady in the place knows how to do this...

Damn, THAT was "interesting"... o_O

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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