Sun initially developed Oak for embedded systems and failed. Then they targeted the desktop and failed. Then they targeted the server and succeeded. Eventually some embedded systems got boatloads of memory and Java succeeded there too.

The difference is that one is pure speculation and the other is a fact.

The problem with your theory is that you can probably violate most of MS patents that relate to .Net without cloning it. They didn't limit the scope to .Net in the patents.

I wouldn't go so far to say one is "evil" and the other "good", but clearly Oracle is trying to suck at Google's teat.

Actually, nobody was under any illusion that J++ apps would run perfectly on Linux or MacOS back in the day. That was just fodder for the court's benefit. Developers who wanted to target Linux or the MacOS weren't developing using Windows and MS tools anyway.

Wasn't it supposed to be MS and .Net that was the trap?

"True, CLI is just an abstraction, a metaphor, but it's a layer or two closer to what's really going on."

The number of levels involved is just an implementation issue. You can learn a lot from studying Unix, but you should be careful about generalizing what you learn from it.

".. but after I upgraded to a Mac SE I spent 10 years using only GUIs until "In the Beginning was the Command Line".."

The "Beginning of what"? Certainly not the beginning of computing.

I too have programed using switches, but I don't see how that relates to the discussion of CLI and GUis.

If you take apart an item, you're going to own it whether you put it back together or not.

More likely they don't know how to troubleshoot it properly. I never work on my car, but I can tell when it's not moving.

Any free Unices that were capable of running on early PCs would have been about as stable as DOS was in those days (there was no processor support for different privilege levels or isolated address spaces). By the time the 386 came along, MS was well-entrenched.

"Those who grew up with computers in pre-GUI times had a rather steep curve but as a consequence became much more proficient"

Yes, at using a CLI. The command line is just as much of an abstraction as a GUI is, just harder to learn.

So you're assuming that the average college student who uses a Mac is more likely to know about Unix than Mac users among the general public? Not so sure about that.

I suspect that most Mac users don't have any idea what Unix is.

In the context of college freshmen, it would be very surprising to find that the small percentage of students who use linux do so without using GNOME or KDE.