If operating systems were soups MacOS: The customer walks into the restaurant, sits down, and orders the MacOS soup. The waiter serves his soup promptly, a nice steaming bowl with good tasting soup. The customer looks around the restaurant and realizes that everyone is eating the Windows 95 soup, but he doesn't mind, cause he likes his soup just fine. He complains to the waiter that his favorite wine isn't chilled to the right temperature, even though he didn't order it and isn't being charged for it. A person at another table eating the Windows 95 soup brags about how he can choose to replace the chicken in his soup with different chicken if he wants to. The MacOS soup eater wonder why the hell he'd want to change what kind of chicken is in the soup in the first place, seeing as it is some of the best chicken he's ever tasted in his life. Windows NT: The customer, a rich customer, sits down and heads straight for the most complex, expensive soup on the menu, which happens to be the Windows NT soup. It has several dozen ingredients listed, more than he's seen in any other soup. After a two hour wait, the waiter walks out with a huge steaming cauldron of soup and plops it down in front of the customer. The waiter hands him a special spoon and a manual which describes how exactly to eat the soup. The customer wants to get to all the juicy stuff that was described on the menu, but when he looks into the cauldron, he realizes that all the good stuff has sunk to the bottom of the cauldron. He consults the manual, which tells him that the only way to get to the good stuff is to eat the broth off the top. He takes a few sips of the broth, which turns out to be very bitter. He thinks he can just about reach a nice looking piece of chicken, but he reaches too far, falls into the soup, and drowns. Windows 95: The customer walks in, sits down, and looks around. Everyone is eating Windows 95 soup, so he figures he should get some as well. After a half hour wait, the waiter presents to him a bowl of soup in a cracked bowl covered in flies. The customer complains about the flies, but the waiter says he'll have to wait until they make another batch with less flies. The customer tries to squash the flies with his spoon, but it only serves to spill soup all over the table, and the waiter has to bring him another bowl. After many tries, he manages to get most of the flies out of his soup. Just as he's about to start eating, the waiter yanks his bowl away and replaces it with another one. "This new soup," the waiter says, "will cost you more, but it is much better than the old soup." Since the old soup is no longer being served, the customer decides to get a bowl of the new soup, only to discover that it has even more flies in it than the first soup. Windows 98: The customer, upon examining the menu, is immediately assaulted with advertisements declaring that Windows 95 soup is no longer being served and that you should get the Windows 98 soup instead. The Windows 98 soup, like the Windows 95 soup, comes in a cracked bowl covered with flies. Unlike the other soups, which come with free rolls and butter, a soda, and a mint afterwards, the Windows 98 soup has all of these integrated into the soup itself. This way, you don't have to bother with eating them separately. While eating the soup, the customer accidentally drops his spoon on the floor. The waiter gives him a new spoon, which doesn't look like it is appropriate for eating the Windows 98 soup. The customer asks the waiter about it, and the waiter responds saying "The Windows 98 soup will automatically configure itself to your new silverware without having to pour a new bowl." You look at the soup, which begins to bubble, fizz, and change colors. Eventually, it starts steaming uncontrollably, turns a bright shade of blue, and the bowl shatters, spilling the soup all over the table and the floor. DOS: The customer walks into the restaurant and sits down. The cheapest soup that he can see on the menu is the DOS soup, so he orders it. He is promptly served a teacup full of chicken broth. When he asks where all the goodies are that he is used to in his soup, the waiter replies "This is a very good soup, sir. No one ever complains about its price or that it's too elaborate. In fact, the DOS broth makes up the basis for our Windows 95 soup, which is very popular." Linux: The customer walks in, sits down, looks at the menu, and decides to order Liunx soup. The waiter goes back to the kitchen, and when he comes back, he hands the customer a pot of water, a bunch of vegetables, some grain, a live chicken, and a plastic knife and says "Make it yourself." After many hours of trying to cut the vegetables with the plastic knife, chasing the chicken around the restaurant, and lighting the table on fire to boil the water, he finally is able to sit down with the soup just the way he likes it. BeOS: The customer walks in, sits down, and after examining the menu for a while, discover the BeOS soup in small print on the back. It's free, so he decides to give it a shot. The waiter comes out of the kitchen with a cart covered with all sorts of attractive, expensive china. He takes the lid off from over the soup, releasing a puff of good-smelling steam, and says "Enjoy." Unfortunately, when the customer looks into the bowl, he realizes that it is empty. OS 2/Warp: The customer looks and looks but cannot find the OS 2/Warp soup anywhere on the menu. Rhapsody: After examining the menu, he sees that the restaurant will be serving a new soup in a couple of months called the Rhapsody soup. The soup will have the best ingredients combined from the MacOS and UNIX soups, as well as the broth from the NeXT soup, a little known soup that is the daily diet of a few million people. It comes with a side order of pure MacOS soup in a blue bowl, in case you want to eat it while you get used to the new soup. The Rhapsody soup will also be served by a group of specially trained waiters, who will tuck in your napkin and refill your beverage whenever you want it. These are things you would have done yourself anyway, but now you don't have to bother. The Rhapsody soup also comes with a special yellow container full of prepared ingredients that go perfectly with Rhapsody, MacOS, Windows 95, and Windows NT flavor soups. This looks like a really good soup, so you ask the waiter exactly when they're going to start serving it. The waiter says "Come to our World Wide Soup Conference in May."
