Don't Worry About What Anybody Else Is

The Idea That Hardware On Networks Should Just Be Caches For Movable Process Descriptions And The Processes Themselves Goes Back Quite A Ways. There's A Real Sense In Which Ms And Apple Never Understood Networking Or Operating Systems (or What Objects Really Are), And When They Decided To Beef Up Their Oss, They Went To (different) Very Old Bad Mainframe Models Of Os Design To Try To Adapt To Personal Computers.

The Result Is - Document Destruction - We're Really Not Going To Be Able To Prove Beyond A Truth The Negatives And Some Of The Positive Conclusions That We're Going To Come To. There Will Be Always Unresolved Ambiguity Here.

I Fear - As Far As I Can Tell - That Most Undergraduate Degrees In Computer Science These Days Are Basically Java Vocational Training. I've Heard Complaints From Even Mighty Stanford University With Its Illustrious Faculty That Basically The Undergraduate Computer Science Program Is Little More Than Java Certification.

A New Friend Is New Wine, When It Grows Old, You Will Enjoy Drinking It.

Basic Would Never Have Surfaced Because There Was Always A Language Better Than Basic For That Purpose. That Language Was Joss, Which Predated Basic And Was Beautiful. But Basic Happened To Be On A Ge Timesharing System That Was Done By Dartmouth, And When Ge Decided To Franchise That, It Started Spreading Basic Around Just Because It Was There, Not Because It Had Any Intrinsic Merits Whatsoever.