Well, especially if you search for "rename README to README.txt" on google and
see how many "projects" have changesets/commits with exactly those titles and
with comments about the convenience of having the .txt on there. My comment was
just about the "good ole days" of 300 or 110 baud, when we really did hate to
have more characters than necessary. When UCB's C-compiler got 32 identifiers
it was just terrible to have to read that much "code" and, considering they
always put the "different characters" on the end, we'd end up with multiple
definitions of the same variable names.
It was way to common to find silly header files
#define cursive_letter_a a_cursive_letter
#define cursive_letter_b b_cursive_letter
etc to try and fix those kinds of problems...
Heck, we had a X.25 network provided by Oklahoma State University's computer
services (TELENET was the name) that we had to dial up to (I had a 300 baud
radio shack modem), and then "dial" into the schools computers. Think about the
movie "War Games". That's what it felt like. In order to get VI or other
interactive applications to work, we had to change the buffering and timeout
parameters to get single character packets and that made it very expensive to use...
Thank goodness those days are long gone...
I just went looking for one of the old USENET discussions on README vs
README.txt and got caught up reading about the great renaming of USENET in 1986.
Heck, I remember when all we used was "Notes" via CSNET. When CSNET finally
decided to use USENET instead of Notes, we all cried at how bad an application
the USENET reader was.
Okay, enough reminiscing...
Gregg
On 6/14/2011 3:58 PM, Patricia Shanahan wrote:
The early days of UNIX definitely suffered from developers acting as
though they had to pay for every character they typed. See command names
such as "ls" and "rm".
It may have been a reflection of use of paper-based terminals, such as
thermal printers, or of slow communication speeds. At 110 baud I
resented every wasted character.
I can see saving characters as a reason for picking a name in the 1970's
or even 1980's, but I'm questioning why "LICENSE" is preferred over
"LICENSE.txt" in 2011, with broadband, large screens, and modern keyboards.
If I could be sure the only reason for the preference for "LICENSE" is
the typing non-issue, I would definitely support adding ".txt".
Patricia
On 6/14/2011 1:43 PM, Gregg Wonderly wrote:
I just remember this arguments in other circles about README and other
such files. I agree that it seems implausible, given the simply
disputable facts such as typing speed etc. For README, I heard the "too
much typing" from UNIX people who just seemed to be hating on the
Windows users who just wanted to click the darn file.
