MS Dos, Linux, and VMS

When my operating systems professor assigned a paper comparing the system calls of MS Dos, Linux, and VMS he called it a simple assignment. You know, simple, the same word that is used by mathematicians to describe the fundamental process of turning three pages of garbage into one line of information. Simple, like pulling the teeth of a tiger using rusty pliers and no sedative.

For those who do not know, Microsoft has not updated the Dos prompt since 2000. Linux is written by the sort of super nerds who will one day rule the world from their basement offices and game rooms. VMS is only refered to on the Internet in private rants about how damnably difficult it is to update legacy systems using this dinosaur of operating system prehistory.

So here I sit, much of my weekend squandered on this pointless assignment, muttering "simple" to myself and laughing in that crazed desperate way a person in a mental institution might laugh if not for all the sedatives. I cannot, however, simply (eh heh heh hee) say that this professor is the sole beacon of misunderstanding in this institution of monotony that I call college.

Reasons unknown to normal human beings have driven every professor I have to feel that all of those things that their professors taught them in college, all of the things they learned through experience, and all of the things they read about in their free time are simply the logical result of being awake. As though I, having never been taught and having never used a VMS machine before last week, would automatically know all of the commands and quarks of the system simply (hee hee hee *snort*) because I chose computer science as my major instead of English or History.

I was in grade school when the topics he expects me to already know were being studied by people who are his age now. If only I had been born fifty years ago, then I would be able to pass an operating systems class now.

Excuse me . . . I need to mop up the ooze that was once my brain, and I thought computers were cool . . . Wahahahaha . . . haha . . . heh . . . *hic* . . . *sob*.