[Novalug] Linux and Novallug

James Ewing Cottrell III jecottrell3@comcast.net
Tue Sep 19 15:38:21 EDT 2017


I went to UMD right out of high school from 72 to 76, and used card 
readers for batch jobs on a UNIVAC 1108. Then I discovered the Teletype 
room. Sure, we didn't have any problem, because we didn't know any 
better, and at that age, we had time to burn. Still, 110 Baud meant 10 
characters per second, and eventually it adds up.

It should be obvious that the folks at Bell Labs were motivated 
partially by Laziness, and I mean the Good Kind, the kind that Larry 
Wall extols in his Perl Books. I still believe that almost everything 
you type should be a one or two character alias or function.

And since I don't Touch Type, aliases mean a great deal more to me. 
Also, WPM measures mostly English (or $LANG) words, not shell syntax 
riddled with punctuation.

Regardless of their motivation, the fact that the Core Command set
almost never tops 5 characters is pretty significant.

JIM

On 9/19/2017 9:23 AM, Peter Larsen via Novalug wrote:
> On 09/19/2017 04:55 AM, Jon LaBadie via Novalug wrote:
>>> The idea here is that the shortest command are in general the most
>>> important/frequently used.
>>>
>> Lots of those commands with short names originated in early UNIX
>> when Teletype machines were the human interface device.  Pressing
>> those stiff, long travel keys was error prone and finger fatiguing.
>> It made sense to use short names for commonly used commands.
> 
> I guess I have to pull "age" out here and make the following statement:
> I've used teletypes, punch-card writers - heck, I even learned to use
> mechanical type-writers because only "the girls" were allowed to use the
> electric type writers (us guys weren't expected to need typing much -
> ohhh how wrong they were). My speed was between 80 and 110 words a
> minute - on manual type writers. Teletypes were actually easier to type
> on that the mechanical ones because no force was needed. Often when I
> was on site with customers and started working they would comment in awe
> that I was typing too fast for them to follow. I even complained that
> kbd.com was too slow on DOS (8 character buffer), filed bugs against WP
> because it could not keep up with my typing (before they attempted
> Windows versions and went bust). My first IBM PC literately BEEPED at me
> when I started typing code. I think it was around DOS 3 or 4 when we
> could finally adjust the keyboard buffer and things began to keep up,
> sorta.
> 
> Anyway - I wasn't the only one. People from that generation did not have
> a problem with teletypes. They were used to the mechanical ones and when
> compared, the teletype was a breeze to use. And much louder than the
> mechanical ones, so you could REALLY elevate your status my making a
> ruckus :)
> 
> So with that in mind, I'm asking - do you have anything to back up that
> story? It's really hard for me to believe that it had anything to do
> with the chosen command names.
> 

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