Xavious wrote:
but theres alot i dont know about it, for example, until reading this topic i thought it didnt have a GUI at all, like it was command driven or some crap...
Right now I am at my work office and nothing is functioning right now, so I have plenty of time to waste and took another look at the spam thread. And w00t I felt like replying to that one again
If you think about it, GUI stands for Graphical User Interface. In other words. That does not mean the underlying system is not command driven. Any Operating System is, or show me one that isn't. It is just a difference if how you access it.
What Xavious probably meant was "I though you have to type commands on a prompt all the time" instead of "it was command driven". Because what a GUI does is nothing more than translate your mouse-clicking guestures into commands - which normally could just as well have been executed on a command prompt. If not, the term GUI is not really appropriate. But the principle is not whether a system is command driven or not, but only how the commands are being issued.
A GUI certainly makes a few things easier, for example, on a command prompt you can just enter any arbitrary text. Most combinations of letters are no commands but just nonsense to the command interpreter. A GUI can give you the benefit of pre-sorting out all the commands a system has available, lining them up nicely on a viewscreen - click to execute manner or something like that. No riddling around what commands exist at all.
But... not every GUI is really good either... even if you see all the commands available (or only a subset), it is still little use if you don't know what the commands do, or which arguments can be passed. An intelligently made GUI will assist you here too.
Windows, I consider mostly as a GUI, much less as an Operating System. Win9X need HIMEM.SYS as explained earlier so they are no Operating Systems to start with, since HIMEM.SYS is a DOS-Driver - so the Operating System running on a Win9X machine is MS-DOS - although "version 7" that comes with Win9X is already enhanced a bit (long filename support in 32bit mode etc...) - but still, it -IS- DOS. Win9X is just a large GUI that adds a lot of features on top of the OS, as any program usually does (adding features that is), but it's no Operating System.
NT might be considered a slightly different story, since the Kernel is basically what makes NT tick, and it doesn't rely on any DOS-driver or other base. NT is (at least to my knowledge) really self-sustained and thus an Operating System on its own. Likely that is the reason all current Windows versions are NT based, since MS-DOS cannot be adjusted further to make use of all that new technology that comes out, or it would simply be a waste of effort. Also, the NT base appears to be more stable.
Win 3.11 is a pure GUI and nothing more, a bad one too! The advertising of multitasking is a lie.
Linux and the original Commodore Amiga-OS are probably the best examples for a REAL Operating Systems. The kernels are so tiny they can fit on a single-density disk and can already run (basic) programs off that base!
The Amiga-GUI known as "Workbench" and the Linux "KDE" make no lie about the fact they are not an Operating System, but only a GUI - which means they run on top of the OS and do NOT offer Operating System functions. They do add features to it of course, but are not really part of the Operating System.
Well, the Linux geeks may correct me here possibly... but I do know pretty well how the A-OS and Workbench are designed.
So long....
Sp@m