Re: How Windows Succeeded

On Fri, 24 May 2024 20:04:32 -0400, DFS wrote:

Just curious: approx what percent of your lifetime income came from
Windows-related work?  Linux/Unix?  Other?

That's difficult to answer. Prior to my current job, 0% Windows. Much of
it was embedded work using various assemblers, 8080, Z80, 8049, TI9900,
etc. Some projects involved DOS. One used an AT for a supervison with a
network of slaved (excuse me) XTs controlling environmental chambers.

The answer for the last 25 years is ambiguous too. Historically the
software ran on AIX and was ported to Linux. One of my work machines is
Linux and will run the entire suite with the exception of Esri apps. We do
have a proprietary geodatabase but for the last ten or twelve years sites
have favored Esri.

Now for the gotcha.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKS_Toolkit

Again, with the exception of Esri apps the entire codebase is ported to
Windoes using the MKS runtime. The GUIs are Motif and display using the
PTC X server. The clients are running Windows and really aren't aware that
they aren't native Windows apps.

So, if I develop on Linux and the code is compiled on Windows using a
runtime to provide interoperability, is it really Windows related work? If
I write a utility to validate Esri geodata in C++ and using Esri's
ArcObjects toolkit it's Windows. After Esri EOL'd ArcObjects I rewrote the
geocode to pull the necessary data from the ArcGIS Server interface. Since
that's just a REST API it works fine on Windows or Linux. Some data is
cached in SQLite, again Windows or Linux? Even better while some Esri
tools are still Windows only ArcGIS Server runs on either OS and is just
as happy serving up data from a PostgreSQL database running on Linux.
ASP.NET services? It's 2024 and dotnet works nicely on Linux.

The Angular web interface we developed doesn't care if it's running on
Windows or Linux.

I never did much work with it but we did a Java app for cross-platform
use. Again, it doesn't care. DB2? Don't care. etc, etc.

As a guess, I'd say around 10% of what I've done in this century is tied
to Windows. That doesn't mean it can't run of Windows.