Quote:

I've been attending the USENIX NT and LISA NT (Large Installation

Systems Administration for NT) conference in downtown Seattle this

week.



One of those magical Microsoft moments(tm) happened yesterday and

I thought that I'd share. Non-geeks may not find this funny at

all, but those in geekdom (particularly UNIX geekdom) will

appreciate it.



Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager (henceforth MPM), was

holding forth on a forthcoming product that will provide Unix

style scripting and shell services on NT for compatibility and to

leverage UNIX expertise that moves to the NT platform. The

product suite includes the MKS (Mortise Kern Systems) windowing

Korn shell, a windowing PERL, and lots of goodies like awk, sed

and grep. It actually fills a nice niche for which other products

(like the MKS suite) have either been too highly priced or not

well enough integrated.



An older man, probably mid-50s, stands up in the back of the room

and asserts that Microsoft could have done better with their

choice of Korn shell. He asks if they had considered others that

are more compatible with existing UNIX versions of KSH.



The MPM said that the MKS shell was pretty compatible and should

be able to run all UNIX scripts.



The questioner again asserted that the MKS shell was not very

compatible and didn't do a lot of things right that are defined in

the KSH language spec.



The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and

should work quite well.



This assertion and counter assertion went back and forth for a

bit, when another fellow member of the audience announced to the

MPM that the questioner was, in fact David Korn of AT&T (now

Lucent) Bell Labs. (David Korn is the author of the Korn shell)



Uproarious laughter burst forth from the audience, and it was one

of the only times that I have seen a (by then pink cheeked) MPM

lost for words or momentarily lacking the usual unflappable

confidence. So, what's a body to do when Microsoft reality

collides with everyone elses?