Thread: The future of your Nokia Windows phone
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Copernicus is offline Copernicus
2011-03-03 , 18:24
Posts: 1,986 | Thanked: 7,698 times | Joined on Dec 2010 @ Dayton, Ohio
#246
Aha, now I understand! We differ in our definition of what "Unix" is. Thank you for the clarification.

Originally Posted by Capt'n Corrupt View Post
Yes, Unix is beneath iOS. But the user interface is certainly not Unix, is quite far removed from it, and heavily tied to iOS.
Personally, I tend to tie the concept of "Unix" much closer to the kernel than you do. Back in the good old PDP-11 days, when Unix first appeared, the shell, editors, compilers, and other utilities bundled with the OS were just that: bundled with the OS, not actually part of it. Unix has always had a plethora of command line shells, and when GUIs became popular, a whole bunch of them too; so, I've never personally gotten comfortable with saying that any particular shell or GUI is the true "Unix" user interface.

So, from my point of view, the iOS GUI is just as much a Unix interface as the OS X GUI is. (Even if it does lack many of my favorite features.)

Originally Posted by Capt'n Corrupt View Post
So saying that people are 'learning unix' takes a bit more than a stretch. Put another way: using iOS would not make you more proficient with Open Solaris, nor would it with Ubuntu, or even the common Unix denominator between these OSs.
Similarly, using Windows 7 doesn't necessarily mean you'd do well using Windows 3.1, or DOS, or Interix for that matter. Just because two operating systems share some particular heritage with one another doesn't mean that their interfaces need to be in any way similar.

Again, though, this is using my own definition of what an operating system is. If you believe that the user interface is the operating system, then yeah, neither iOS nor OS X are truly "Unix".
 

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