Microsoft's (Megasloth's ?) Non-Imitations
Though Microsoft has been
shamelessly imitative in many things, and often not coming out with very
good imitations, there are two things that M$, as I sometimes like to
abbreviate its name has not imitated very well multibooting and scripting.
Here is a more detailed discussion:
Multibooting
One nice feature of the MacOS
(from Apple)
is that one can easily choose which disk to boot from. Open the control
panel "Startup Disk", and one will have a choice of all available disks to
boot from. OS/2
(from IBM)
goes one better with its "Boot Manager", because one can select which
disk one wants to boot off of after one crashes, instead of before, as is
the case with the MacOS. The Boot Manager will show a (changeable)
default choice which will be booted off of if one does not choose some
other disk.
Two others,
Linux and
the BeOS,
also appear to have good multibooters, though I only have experience
with the Macintosh-hardware BeOS multibooter.
However, there is one glaring exception: Microsoft. Examination of its
website revealed very little on multibooting; I did, however, manage to
find one page on how to multiboot Win95 and Win3.x, and it was an
incredible contortion.
Also, installing Win95 and WinNT has a tendency to render previous
multibooters useless. One has to install other OSes, multibooters and
all, after them.
Scripting
Microsoft, despite its pretentions of being a leader in computing and OS
design, is far behind on this one.
Its excuse of a CLI, DOS (and the DOS imitation that WinNT uses as its
CLI mode), has a rather pathetic scripting facility in the DOS "batch"
facility. Nothing like what one can get on Unix.
And its GUI's do not have anything *nearly* as convenient and snazzy as
AppleScript.
With AppleScript, one can record what some app does and edit the
recording to one's heart's desire.
However, Microsoft has not even tried to imitate AppleScript, despite making
hooks in Windows (Windoze?) for doing something of the sort ("OLE
Automation").
More recently, they have devised something called the
"Windows Scripting Host", but I don't know much about that.
Back to my computer-center page.