On 11/6/2013 4:15 PM, Rich Greenberg wrote:
I have been around a long time. Retired 10 years and the first "mainframe" I touched had tubes in it. (Bouroughs 220) A historical note for Gerhard and others who wonder about the cryptic commands in Unix (and derivatives). It was largely because of what was available as interactive terminals at the time. Sloooooow TTYs. 60 to 100 chars per minute. Note: Thats per minute, not per second. So commands were as short as possible. "cp" is half as many chars as "copy". On the "mass" storage of the time (i.e. paper tape), "copy" would have been twice as long (both on the tape and the sending time).
My first machine was an IBM 709 - every morning the C.E. would wheel around a shopping cart full of tubes and replace them. The removed ones were tested for possible re-use. IIRC they were all in the 12Ax7 family (AU,AV,AW,AX,AY), and rejects were useful in radio and audio equipment.
The first interactive terminal I used was an IBM 1050, running at 145 bps (14.5 cps). It used normal ForTran, with no shortcuts. Later I worked with TTY compatibles, at 110 bps up to 19200 bps. Those we used with Wylbur, and again speed, or lack thereof, wasn't a factor in name assignment.
But your post did make me wonder whether the one character name convention in BASIC was due to terminal speed or lazy programming <g>
Gerhard Postpischil Bradford, Vermont ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
