Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4570 mails)

[Randall R Schulz <rschulz@xxxxxxxxx>]

Steven,

On Sunday 13 November 2005 21:51, Steven T. Hatton wrote:
> On Sunday 13 November 2005 11:59 pm, Anders Johansson wrote:
> > Client/Server has absolutely nothing to do with any of this. That
> > design concept was around before Microsoft and has nothing to do
> > with desktops or anything else in this discussion.
>
> I disagree.  The traditional concept of client/server was desktop
> client/{file,database} server.  Certainly there were a few others
> talking about client/server in the sense that Microsoft used the
> idea, but that was not the typical meaning intended by use of the
> term.
>
> > A file server is a client/server
> > design, and was used in the Novell servers Microsoft competed with
>
> That is exactly what Microsoft decoupled.  A file server became a
> file service.

That was by _no means_ a Microsoft innovation. We at Locus Computing 
Corporation wrote the first Unix / DOS transparent file sharing 
software in the mid 80s. Our people wrote the INT 31 interceptor (if 
I've got that interrupt code right) and a user-mode, Unix-based server. 
The protocol was of our own design.

We also wrote the first Unix-hosted MSNet file and print server a few 
years later. In that case, the DOS-resident software was stock the MS 
module but the Unix server was still user-mode and portable. It was 
written initially for System V Release 3 Unix (using the SVR3 TLI, not 
BSD sockets, though we wrote networking interface abstraction layer) 
and was originally developed on 3B20 desktops machines (which were 
_very_ nice machines for the time). I was the architect and lead 
programmer for that project. And to be clear, it predated Samba.

Microsoft invented nothing in the field of operating systems. While I 
believe all the Windows operating system kernels from NT onward are 
good software, they are not novel.


> > ...
>
> Steven


Randall Schulz