You have a good imagination.

I worked on COM at Microsoft. We had a project to add managed run-time capabilities to COM. This was ~'96.

Internally we thought of the Component Object Model that shipped as part of OLE as "COM version 1". The version that supported distributed capabilities (aka DCOM) as "COM version 2".

When we started working on adding managed runtime support we started talking about "COM 3". But that talk stopped quickly when I tried to create a directory named COM3 for some specs.

Creating the directory wasn't a problem. But putting anything in it or deleting was.

We quickly settled on the name "COR" for Component Object Runtime instead.

We actually released the COR at the '96 (I think) PDC as an alpha. But it never actually shipped because .NET won the internal battle (full IL based managed runtime to replace COM vs. incrementally adding garbage collection and other managed capabilites to COM ala Objective-C).

Later on, as the MS Transaction Server group was merged with the COM team, the name COM+ was invented to cover "DCOM + Transaction Server + MSMQ". This led to the fabled Project42 which I have chosen to forget.

I remember reading articles about COM+ which didn't mean MSMQ but looked more like something close to what .net framework became. Then I've read that Msmq and thought "what?" Wasn't then COR the first mentioning of what you name COR?

Wow, haha, thanks for sharing that. My old suspicions finally confirmed! :)

They should have just incremented the last letter of COM to create the new version CON.

Explorer->Right click->New folder->CON...

Oh.

That's interesting. But try creating a folder called .NET in Windows explorer... :-) Hint - you can't!

Sure you can.

Create a folder.

Rename it to ".Net.". The dot at the end of the folder name is important.

Interesting. But they didn't call it dot-net-dot :-)

Explorer silently strips the trailing dot and is tricked into doing the right thing.

Nice! So when they couldn't use a reserved folder name, they went for the next best thing ;)

This becomes quite annoying when I try to create a .htaccess file. (Command line rename is the only solution I've found.)

Cygwin. Don't use the Windows command line. Just don't.

And while you are at it, use PuTTY-based Minterm instead of the Windows console.

Can you explain why? I use cygwin when I need GNU-like tools (sed, grep, etc.) but for something like renaming a file I don't see the point of using a slower terminal that requires more typing (

    cd /cygdrive/c/Doc<tab><wait>/mkop<tab><wait>/Desktop/bla

vs

    cd \Doc<tab>mkop<tab>Des<tab>bla

) just so I can type "mv" instead of "rename".

I've never used minterm. What does it do better?

With Cygwin, your home directory should be your WINHOME (I'm doing this from memory, bear with me), so, in fact, your cd would be

    cd Desk<tab>bla

or, worst case,

    cd ~/Des<tab>bla

Running programs is also a tiny fraction of what bash can do - it's a full (well... almost) fledged scripting language and you can do things like loops, conditionals and other stuff. Before I discovered watch, I'd do things like

    while true; do df -h ; sleep 10 ; clear ; done

Also, the PuTTY-based console has a lot of niceties when compared to a plain console window - it's prettier, you have better font controls and better clipboard integration.

In my default cygwin install, my home directory was C:\cygwin\home\mkopinsk. I just changed it (in C:\Cygwin\etc\profile) to /cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings/mkopinsk so hopefully it should be a bit less painful now. I will consider switching to a non-cygwin solution in the future.

That's odd. What version of Windows are you using? Last time I used Cygwin (XP or Vista, can't remember), the home defaulted to the Windows home.

XP. I don't remember changing any options in setup.exe, but who knows. Bottom line it's fixed.

Use MSYS (part of MinGW) and Console2 (set bash as shell).

cd /c/Doc<tab>/mkop<tab>/Desktop/bla

This doesn't answer my main question, which is WHY? What do these tools do better (enough to matter)?

I prefer the Unix command line everywhere. MSYS gives you a Unix shell, and all the Unix tools, built right on top of win32. I haven't used it in years, but I understand Cygwin is quite a bit heavier.

The cmd.exe terminal is atrocious. Even if you don't want to use Bash, Console2 gives you things like tabs, and you can resize the window normally.

tldr; It's not slower, it doesn't involve more typing, it gives you a sane Unix command-line experience on Windows.