Dave Sill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes on 23 June 1999 at 14:49:41 -0400
> Russell Nelson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
> >The value of a GUI is not that it's graphical, nor that it's colorful,
> >nor that it uses the whole screen. It's that it allows the user to
> >merely recognize the right answer rather than having to recollect it
> >Command completion, originally used in tops-20, and most often seen in
> >kermit, and cisco routers these days, is a reasonable compromise
> >between a full gui and the typical incompetent command line most
> >Unices use.
>
> Ah, TOPS-20. My first job, back in '85, was admin'ing a DEC 20. It's a
> shame VMS didn't incorporate command completion. I'm also suprised
> nobody's retrofitted it to Linux via readline. Precious few programs
> even use readline. How handy would filename completion and command
> recall be in an ftp client?
Bash does command completion and filename completion and username
completion (in ~name constructs). Bash is the default shell on
Linux. This doesn't give you the depth that TOPS-20 did; a program
that used the COMND jsys for the command line interface knew the type
of each parameter and could supply appropriate assistance, whereas in
BASH a command line is always assumed to refer to files, and that's
really all it can help you with.
(I worked with tops-20 from 1977 to 1985, and worked for DEC in
Marlboro doing TOPS-20 layered product development from '81 to '85).
Remember kermit, the file transfer program that would move data over
terminal lines from a desktop system to *anything*? Its command
interface was patterned after TOPS-20. It always felt very homey to
me.
--
David Dyer-Bennet [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.ddb.com/~ddb (photos, sf) Minicon: http://www.mnstf.org/minicon
http://ouroboros.demesne.com/ The Ouroboros Bookworms
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