Talk:Time-sharing system evolution
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[edit] Is MS Windows a timesharing system?
I've always thought a timesharing system had to support multiple concurrent users. AFAIK no Windows version does this - the NT-2000-XP-Vista lineage allows multiple logged-on users, but only 1 can use the system interactively at a time (I'm not sure about background tasks under multiple logged-on users). Philcha (talk) 20:41, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
[edit] MS Windows other than 3
I think the table (which is an excellent summarising device) understates the complexity of the ancestry of Windows versions beyond Windows 3 (which was just a GUI front-end for MS-DOS):
- Win NT was mainly influenced by OS2 and Vax VMS, and not significantly by Win 3 except that they support MS-DOS commands. Win 2000, Win XP and Win Vista are descendants of NT, with increasing imports of "user-friendliness" from the Win 95 lineage (earlier) and Mac OSs (recently).
- I'm less sure about the main influences on Win 95, 98 and ME. They use much the same UI design and the same shortcut format (in the Start Menu, etc.) as the NT-2000-XP-Vista lineage, and like NT etc. support long filenames; but they resemble Win 3 in using a FAT-based file system and relying on co-operative multi-tasking because they lack pre-emptive multi-tasking.
The problem is how to express all this:
- A full network of relationships / influences could be as confusing as a spider's web. It might help to colour-code the lines from each source / predecessor.
- One could distinguish major and minor influences by the width of connecting lines in a network, but that would rather subjective. Philcha (talk) 20:37, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
