
  Look out Bill Gates....   Here Comes Alice!


                      Alice Announces Text-Based OS

 Alice is quite elated. She is CEO of a large corporation, and my
 friend.  It seems she has written a new operating system which is
 command line driven. This avoids the cumbersome use of a mouse, and
 offers greater flexibility of operations, not to mention the
 possibility of writing macros (.BAT files) to accomplish tailor made
 tasks.

 It has a shell capability which means that individual programs can use
 it for temporary OS functioning. Feeling that graphical interfaces
 confuse  the user and lull them into a false sense of security, Alice
 demonstrated how this new OS could revolutionize the Windows World at
 the Command Line OS convention in Boston this week.

 She demonstrated that by having command line interface, the heartbreak
 of trying to position the mouse just so, - is now avoided! Also, since
 it is text based, the system's graphics capabilities are less likely to
 be taxed.  And the command line interface puts the user closer to the
 machine level than windowed OS's.  Industry analysts heralded this
 retro move as very welcome, and Microsoft stock plummeted after her
 presentation, which was conceived and executed on a 286 AT platform
 with 2 MEGS of RAM.

 Also of note was that when a program did crash, the particular error
 was noted, in contrast to the leading GUI, when more often than not the
 message was "GPF" and an address. Alice pointed out that there is ample
 support for her OS, and a minimum of housekeeping files needed to keep
 it afloat.  Every attempt was made to hide the unfriendly "click me"
 aspects of the machine, putting the command set in the foreground on a
 plain black screen. Alice's company is planning on offering a rebate to
 those users of windowed OS's in an effort to woo users from what she
 describes as the "rush to dumdumland."


 Peter Neuendorffer is a Windows programmer, musician, satirist and my
 friend! He has been associated with WindoWatch as a contributing writer.


                                      ww


