Regarding NOS/VE and the notion that its command language was horribly awkward ... the command language was strongly influenced by Multics and some thinking in the Computer Science world about user-friendliness in command languages being linked to predictability. Commands in NOS/VE's SCL (System Command Language) were verbose and their names followed strict rules. Specifically, every command began with a verb followed by an object, and one or two modifiers might occur between them. The individual words were separated by underscores. And, every command could be abbreviated in a standard and predictable way -- first three letters of verb followed by first letter of each subsequent word. Examples:
create_file (abbreviated cref) delete_file (abbreviated delf) display_catalog (disc) display_command_list (discl) display_command_parameters (discp) edit_file (edif) etc. There were similar, predictable rules about command parameter names and their abbreviations. The language truly was very predictable and actually quite easy to learn because of it. Unfortunately, it reached the market too late. For example, it came to market around the same time as X-Windows, which muted the need for "user-friendly" command languages. Also, NOS/VE ran on expensive Cyber 180 mainframes and came to market during the time that supermini's were flourishing and Moore's Law was turning PC's into competitive computing platforms too. On Thu, May 16, 2024 at 11:13 AM Paul Koning via cctalk < cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > > > On May 16, 2024, at 11:08 AM, Gary Grebus via cctalk < > cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > > > We were a beta test site for NOS/VE and the hardware (Cyber 180?). CDC > sent the machine and a software support engineer to help us do something > with it. My one recollection was that the command language was horribly > awkward, but I didn't spend much time on the system. > > > > I know there are some manuals for NOS/VE on bitsavers, but I wonder if > any of the software still exists? > > I don't know if it does. The other issue is that there isn't as far as I > know, an emulator that supports the 64 bit mode it needs. There is of > course a (very solid) emulator for the classic 60 bit architecture, DtCyber. > > paul > >
