CLI vs GUI – Round, uhhhhh, 427,300,405 ?

So I took my semi-frequent stroll over to the UNIX guys on the other side of our office from where us civilized, well-fed Windows nerds reside.  I like them enough.  They’re good folks and enjoy a good joke.  But I had to chuckle when I noticed all their Solaris and AIX monitors had a GUI desktop with multiple Terminal consoles open and command text running amok.  I smiled and asked “so, why don’t you just boot into a pure CLI instead?”  I got no verbal answer, just a smirk or two.  So I continued on: “so…., you guys find it helpful to jump between the CLI windows by way of them floating around in a GUI?”  I got a couple of laughs, but man, I walked away feeling like I won the lottery.

As the Operating Systems turn...

The operating systems I've actually worked or played on, not just logged on and poked around, in chronological order:

1. IBM OS360 / OS/MVT (school*)
2. CV4X (bundled with Computervision CADDS 4X) (work)
3. Intergraph CLIX (VDS, EMS, PDU/PDM) (work)
4. DOS 3.0 (work)
5. DOS 4.22 (work)
6. DOS 5 (work)
7. DOS 6.0 (work)
8. DOS 6.1 (work)
9. DOS 6.2 (work/home)
10. DOS 6.22 (work/home)
11. Windows 3.1 (home)
12. Windows 3.11 "WFWG" (work)
13. Novell Netware 3.12 (work)
14. Novell Netware 4.1 (work)
15. Sun OS (college CS lab)
16. Sun Solaris 2 (college CS lab)
17. Mac OS 7 (college math lab)
18. Mac OS 8 (college math lab)
19. Mac OS 8.5 (college math lab)
20. Mac OS 9 (friend's computer)
21. Mac "Rhapsody" (college beta trial prior to OSX)
22. IBM OS/2 Warp 3 (home, I still miss it)
23. Windows 95 (college English lab)
24. Windows NT 3.51 (work)
25. Windows 98 (work)
26. Windows NT 4.0 (work)
27. Windows 2000 Pro/Server (work)
28. Windows XP Pro (work/home)
29. Windows Server 2003 (work/home)
30. Mac OSX 10.1, 10.4 (apple store, many many many visits)
31. RedHat Linux 6, 7, 8 (work)
32. Suse Linux 8, 9 (work)
33. Windows Vista (work/home)
34. Windows Server 2008 (work/home)
35. Ubuntu Linux 5.04, 5.10, 6.04, 6.10, 7.04, 7.10, 8.04, 8.10, 9.04 (home)
36. Windows 7 (home)

Of all of these, I have several I still like, but Windows 7 is my all-time favorite. It finally just "works" and "feels right" for me. I love it.

The asterisk (*) was a weird story. In the 5th grade, NASA (located nearby) came to our school and asked for four kids to be bused over to a training classroom to do a study on how kids work with computers. They had us program dot-matrix picture print-outs of Pink Panther, Fred Flintstone, George Jetson and the Road Runner. All to see how well we followed instructions to enter simple programming code to print "x" chars to make the pictures. We were bused over one day per week for about two months.

GUI Ka-Flooey!

I had to laugh today.  I work in the "enterprise applications" group, which is adjacent to the "windows server group", which is adjacent to the "UNIX server group".  Big company has big organization stuff of course.  So I mozied over to the UNIX guys with coffee cup in hand and stepped into the middle of the lion's den:  a 4-way cube of UNIX wizards, each having 4 or 6 monitors (I'm not kidding).  

Being the smartass I am, I had to take some silly potshots.  But the first and most obvious was that every single console had Sun Solaris or AIX and a big, ugly, 1980's-looking silver/gray, square-boxy login form sitting there.  I asked "what the hell is that?  A GUI?!"  If you know any UNIX nuts, they love to persist about how everything can (and should) be done via a command console.  GUI's are for noobs, they say.  Not one of them has a command prompt login by default, they're all using a GUI.  They had nothing to counter with except a grin.  Then I had to mention that Windows doesn't need six monitors, we do fine with just two or three.  I'm only kidding of course.  :)