True, but most users didn't know it and, more important, didn't have to. It was much easier to pretend that DOS wasn't still there than it had been with earlier versions of Windows and there was very little need to use it and that was all that they cared about.

This is the start of the 3 Rs of Windows. Retry, Reboot and Reinstall.

Actually, there are 5 Rs. The last two are Reformat, RedHat.

For that, NT 3.1 is the most significant Windows release ever imo.

The big change for me was with Win95. All earlier versions of Windows were bolted on top of MS-DOS, although many people had it started by AUTOEXEC.BAT so they never needed to notice that DOS was still there. Starting with Win95, however, the default was for the computer to boot directly into Windows unless you went out of your way to make it come up in CLI mode. And, as most users were more comfortable with the GUI, that just made their computers work the way they wanted without having to jump through any hoops to set it up. And of course, the ability to have it autorun CDs when they were inserted was another great convenience.

I do use the term "sheeple" on occasion, but only when I really think it fits. As an example, I've been known to use it to describe people who post nothing but slogans either in favor of one side of the question or insulting everybody who dares to disagree with them because they end up sounding exactly like a bunch of sheep baaing, "Four legs good! Two legs bad!" You see that type of thing regularly here, whenever there's a discussion of politics, operating systems, copyright or anything that polarizes people because there are so many posters here that find bleating catch phrases easier than thinking, or finding out why other people don't agree with them.

Maybe when you get to be half my age you'll know better. But I'm not holding my breath, youngster. Now git off my lawn!

Unless you're more than 130 years old, I'm at least half your age, and am possibly older than you are. Hint: I was on the Gun Line in Tonkin Gulf in 1972 doing shore bombardment during the Easter Offensive, before leaving the Navy and going back to computers. Before I joined up, I'd been using an IBM 1620, with punched cards. Want to try a different ad hominem attack?

However your phrasing makes it sound like you have some definitive and "very clever" things in mind.

C has, among other things, the increment operator, ++, that adds one to the variable after taking the old value. (If you put the operator in front of the value, such as ++x, it increments before, rather than after taking the value.) It also specifies that the compiler can take the values of variables in whatever order is most efficient. That means that it is a Very Bad Idea to use the increment operator inside an assignment if the variable is referenced more than once because you can't know just when it gets incremented. The same goes with tests, but more so, because as soon as the answer is known, the test stops. (That is, if you're using a logical AND, if the first condition is FALSE, the second isn't checked.) That means that any "side effects," as these things are called, may or may not occur, and forgetting this Very Important Detail can cause some nasty bugs. The point of that question in the interview was to see if I remembered this.

We got the system back with a Linux live CD and the sysadmin started the vi tutorial the same day.

That's one way to prevent that from happening again. Another way, of course, is turning off line wrapping in whatever editor you prefer to use. Personally, I have nano aliased to include -w to disable wrapping. The fact that one sysadmin managed to misuse nano doesn't mean that it's a bad editor; it's just a tool like any other.

It was about 25 years ago, so I don't remember exactly. However, it wasn't quite as obvious as that, more on the lines of y=x/x++ where the value depends on which order the arguments are evaluated.

The dogmatic part is insisting that everybody uses that tool just because you like it best.

And how, pray tell, do I have maturity problems simply because I don't like the same text editor that you do, but don't insist that you use the one I like?

I don't remember claiming that *nix systems were immune to malware.

Agreed. I run a Linux-only household, except for one Windows laptop that my sister uses because some of the programs she needs for school won't run properly under Wine. I don't run ClamAV or anything like that because I'm not in the habit of downloading random Windows programs and sending them to friends. Right now, almost all of the malware writers are targeting Windows for two reasons. First, that's where most of the potential profit is. Second, there are a lot of anti-social script kiddies out there either using cheat-sheets or cookbooks to write malware programs to exploit vulnerabilities that other people discovered; they've no clue how to fine one of their own. And, those who aren't using the cheat-sheets are using programs that create custom malware for them, so that all they have to do is select a security flaw and a payload and the rest is done for them. And guess what: all of those script kiddies are writing malware for Windows because they can't get their hands on what they'd need to write Linux malware, and wouldn't know how to do it on their own anyway.

And there's another factor here: Linux has much more security designed into it than Windows does, making it a harder target to attack. Yes, I know that there are still people out that who hate SELinux because it was problematic ten or fifteen years ago, but it does make it harder for a malicious program to do its job. And, of course, the fact that most Linux users get their software from their distro instead of downloading files from various third-parties and hoping they're safe helps a lot.

Sorry to go on so long, but once I got started there was just more and more that I realized needed saying.

That alone - that one thing - makes me want to work there. Every single software position I have applied for has been full of "look how tricksy we are, har har, he'll never figure THIS one out!" kind of time wasting trivia questions.

I remember, once, back in the early 90s, being interviewed for a position doing C programming. Part of the interview was looking at various snippits of C code and telling them what they did, just to make sure I really knew the language. I was almost stumped by one example, but finally told them that there was no way to say for sure what would happen because the outcome of that code was quite literally undefined. (Those of you who know C will know what type of thing I'm talking about.) They were quite impressed that I'd recognized this because they'd had a number of other applicants make guesses because they'd forgotten that there are some types of things that C specifically (and for very good reason) leaves undefined. I'm not sure, but that might have been what got me the job.

you present a dogmatic attitude.

If anybody's being dogmatic, it's you. I, OTOH, keep telling you that I don't care what editor you use while you keep denigrating my choice and making ad hominem comments about me because I dare to differ with you. Why does the fact that I don't agree with you make you feel so threatened, especially as I keep telling you to use whatever editor you want?

Keep pushing your opinion on what is the best editor for occasional one line edits on a thread discussing heavy duty programming as if it's relevant, no skin off my back.

At what point in this discussion did I ever insist that nano was the best editor for anybody other than myself? My whole point in commenting has been to explain why I personally like it and why others who's tastes are similar might like it. And, for that matter, this entire thread started off as a remark that with the proper CLI tools you don't need an IDE and it's drifted (as threads often do here) off into a discussion of the merits of various editors. You like vi. Fine; use it if it makes you feel empowered. I've outgrown the need to use obsolete programs just because I can, and use whatever serves my current purposes best, be it GUI or CLI.

"The rest of the world" tends to use vi and emacs.

If all I had to choose from were those two, I'd go back to using emacs. The only reason I don't use it now is that I ran across nano and found it more to my liking. And, on a side note, I find your zealotry and insistence that there's One True Editor amusing. Maybe, by the time you're half my age you'll have grown out of it.

Are you trying to make the case that embedded systems requiring text file reconfiguration and low bandwidth connectivity to such systems is something *rare*?

For the average user, yes, they are. Just because you work with them daily doesn't mean that everybody else does. And, nothing I've written in this thread means that I give a rats ass about what tools you use to do your job because it's none of my business. All I've been doing here is stating why I dislike vi and prefer nano. YMMV, and obviously does. If it makes you happy to pretend that you're still stuck in the 1970s, go for it; I lived through them, as an adult, and I'm glad that the rest of the world has moved on.