RE: Common carriers Re: A letter to Joe

Josh Cohen (joshco@microsoft.com)
Mon, 18 May 1998 12:51:06 -0700


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gregory Alan Bolcer [mailto:gbolcer@gambetta.ics.uci.edu]
> Sent: Monday, May 18, 1998 12:38 PM
> To: Jeff Bone
>
> That would mean that you could actually run MS applications
> separate from the OS?? Amazing. Just imagine having Windows
> running on non-Windows OS platforms. I never understood
> why you couldn't run the Windows windowing toolkits and APIs
> apart from the Windows kernel anyways.
>
In some ways you can. If you look at IE for unix, its more than
just IE ported to Unix. What's been done is a port of various
windows APIs and subsystems to unix.
I'm not an expert on Windows OS stuff, being more of a Unix hacker,
but it seems that the COM interfaces have been built on Unix. The
resultant environment makes the technical aspects of moving many
MS applications to Unix a reasonable task.
So, the potential to move word or excel to Unix becomes a reality.
In fact, while the decision to release has yet to be made,
we've shown examples of word and excel viewers for unix.

> Greg
>
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