A letter by Don Norman, from the days before he became an Apple
Macintosh enthusiast, and GUIs became a widespread thing.

No idea if he is still an Apple enthusiast, or what he thinks about
Apple so proudly touting that its current flagship OS is officially
?Unix??.

----

The truth about Unix: The user interface is horrid
Donald A. Norman
Department of Psychology and Program in Cognitive Science
Center for Human Information Processing
University of California, San Diego
La Jolla, California 92093

(to appear in Datamation)
Norman, D. A. The truth about UNIX. Datamation 27, 12 (1981).

Unix is a highly touted operating system. Developed at the Bell
Telephone Laboratories and distributed by Western Electric, it has
become a standard operating system in Universities, and it promises to
become a standard for the large micro- mini- systems for home, small
business, and educational setting. But for all its virtues as a system
-- and it is indeed an elegant system -- Unix is a disaster for the
casual user. It fails both on the scientific principles of human
engineering and even in just plain common sense. The motto of the
designers of Unix towards the user seems to be "let the user beware."

If Unix is really to become a general system, then it has got to be
fixed. I urge correction to make the elegance of the system design be
reflected as friendliness towards the user, especially the casual
user. I have learned to get along with the vagaries of its user
interface, but our secretarial staff persists only because we insist.
And even I, a heavy user of computer systems for 20 years have had difficulties: copying the old file over the new, transferring a file
into itself until the system collapsed, and removing all the files
from a directory simply because an extra space was typed in the
argument string. In this article I review both the faults of Unix and
also some of the principles of Cognitive Engineering that could
improve things, not just for Unix, but for computer systems in
general. But first, the conclusion; Unix fails several simple tests.

Consistency: The command names, language, functions and syntax are
inconsistent.

Functionality: The command names, formats, and syntax seem to have
no relationship to their functions.

Friendliness: Unix is a recluse, hidden from the user, silent in
operation. "No news is good news" is its motto, but as a result,
the user can't tell what state the system is in, and essentially,
is completely out of touch with things.

Cognitive Engineering: The system does not understand about normal
folks, the everyday users of Unix. Cognitive capabilities are
strained beyond their limits, the lack of mnemonic structures
places large loads of memory, and the lack of interaction puts a
strain on one's ability to retain mentally exactly what state the
system is in at any moment. (Get distracted at the wrong time and
you lose your place -- and maybe your file.)

What is good about Unix? The system design, the generality of
programs, the file structure, the job structure, the powerful
operating system command language (the "shell"). To bad the concern
for system design was not matched by an equal concern for the human
interface.

One of the first things you learn when you start to decipher Unix is
how to list the contents of a file onto your terminal. Now this sounds straightforward enough, but in Unix even this simple operation has its drawbacks. Suppose I have a file called "testfile". I want to see what
is inside of it. How would you design a system to do it? I would have
written a program that listed the contents onto the terminal, perhaps
stopping every 24 lines if you had signified that you were on a
display terminal with only a 24 line display. To the designers of
Unix, however, such a solution lacks elegance. Unix has no basic
listing command, but instead you must use a program meant to do
something else.

In Unix, if you wanted to list the contents of a file called
"HappyDays", you would use the command named "cat":

cat HappyDays

Why cat? Why not? After all, said Humpty Dumpty to Alice, who is to be
the boss, words or us? "Cat", short for "concatenate" as in, take
file1 and concatenate it with file2 (yielding one file, with the first
part file1, the second file2) and put the result on the "standard
output" (which is usually the terminal):

cat file1 file2

Obvious right? And if you have only one file, why cat will put it on
the standard output -- the terminal -- and that accomplishes the goal
(except for those of us with video terminals who watch helplessly as
the text goes streaming off the display).

The Unix designers are rather fond of the principle that special
purpose functions can be avoided by clever use of a small set of
system primitives. Their philosophy is essentially, don't make a
special function when the side-effects of other functions will do what
you want. But there are several reasons why this philosophy is bad;

1. A psychological principle is that names should reflect
function, else the names for the function will be difficult to
recall;

2. Side-effects can be used for virtue, but they can also have
unwarranted effects. Thus, if cat is used unwisely, it will
destroy files (more on this in a moment).

3. Special functions can do nice things for users, such as stop at
the end of screens, or put on page headings, or transform
non-printing characters into printing ones, or get rid of
underlines for terminals that can't do that.

Cat, of course, won't stop at terminal or page boundaries, because if
it did that, why that would disrupt the concatenation feature. But
still, isn't it elegant to use cat for listing? Who needs a print or a
list command. You mean "cat" isn't how you would abbreviate
concatenate? gee, it seems so obvious to us. Just like

function Unix command name
-------- -----------------
c compiler cc
change working directory chdir (cd in Berkeley Unix)
change password passwd
concatenate cat
copy cp
date date
echo echo
editor ed
link ln
move mv
remove rm
search file for pattern grep

Notice the lack of consistency in forming the command name from the
function. Some names are formed by using the first two consonants of
the function name, unless it is the editor which is abbreviated "ed"
and concatenate which is "cat" or "date" or "echo" which are not
abbreviated at all. Note how useful those 2 letter abbreviations are.
See how much time and effort is saved typing only 2 letters instead of
-- heaven forbid -- 4 letters. So what is a little inconsistency among
friends, especially when you can save almost 400 milliseconds per
command.

Similar statements apply to the names of the file directories. Unix is
a file oriented system, with hierarchical directory structures, so the directory names are very important. Thus, this paper is being written
on a file named "unix" and whose "path" is /csl/norman/papers/CogEngineering/unix. The name of the top directory
is "/", and csl, norman, papers, and CogEngineering are the names of directories hierarchically placed beneath "/". Note that the symbol
"/" has two meanings: the name of the top level directory and the
symbol that separates levels of the directories. This is very
difficult to justify to new users. And those names: the directory for
"users" and "mount" are called, of course, "usr" and "mnt." And there
are "bin," "lib," and "tmp." (What mere mortals might call binary,
library, and temp). Unix loves abbreviations, even when the original
name is already very short. To write "user" as "usr" or "temp" as
"tmp" saves an entire letter: a letter a day must keep the service
person away. But Unix is inconsistent; it doesn't abbreviate
everything as 2 or 3 letter commands. It keeps "grep" at its full four
letters, when it could have been abbreviated as "gr" or "gp". (What
does grep mean, you may ask. "Global REgular expression, Print" -- at
least that's the best we can invent, the manual doesn't even try to
say. The name wouldn't matter if grep were something obscure, hardly
ever used, but in fact it is one of the more powerful, frequently used
string processing commands. But that takes me from my topic.)

Do I dare tell you about "dsw"? This also turns out to be an important
routine. Suppose you accidentally create a file whose name has a
non-printing character in it. How can you remove it? The command that
lists the files on your directory won't show non-printing characters.
And if the character is a space (or worse, a "*"), "rm" (the program
that removes files) won't accept it. "dsw" was evidently written by
someone at Bell Labs who felt frustrated by this problem and hacked up
a quick solution. Dsw goes to each file in your directory and asks you
to respond "yes" or "no," whether to delete the file or keep it (or is
it to keep it or delete it -- which action does "yes" mean?). How do
you remember dsw? What on earth does the name stand for? The Unix
people won't tell; the manual smiles its wry smile of the professional programmer and says "The name dsw is a carryover from the ancient
past. Its etymology is amusing." (The implication, I guess, is that
true professionals never need to use such a program, but they are
allowing it to be released for us novices out in the real world.)

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Verification of my charges comes from the experiences of the many
users of Unix, and from the modifications that other people have
been forced to make to the system. Thus, the system of Unix I now
use is called The Fourth Berkeley Edition for the Vax, distributed
by Joy, Babaoglu, Fabry, and Sklower at the University of
California, Berkeley (henceforth, Berkeley Unix). They provide a
listing program that provides all the features I claim a user
would want (except a sensible name -- but Berkeley Unix even makes
it easy to change system names to anything you prefer).
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Which operation takes place if you say "yes": why the file is deleted
of course. So if you go through your files and see important-file, you
nod to yourself and say, yes, I better keep that one, type in yes, and
destroy it forever. Does dsw warn you? Of course not. Does dsw even
document itself when it starts, to remind you which way is which? Of
course not. That would be talkative, and true Unix programmers are
never talkative. (Berkeley Unix, has finally killed dsw, saying "This
little known, but indispensible facility has been taken over...". That
is a fitting commentary on standard Unix: a system that allows an "indispensible facility" to be "little known.")

The symbol "*" means "glob" (a typical Unix name: the name tells you
just what action it does, right?). Let me illustrate with our friend,
"cat." Suppose I want to put together a set of files named paper.1
paper.2 paper.3 and paper.4 into one file. I can do this with

cat: cat paper.1 paper.2 paper.3 paper.4 > newfilename

Unix provides "glob" to make the job even easier. Glob means to expand
the filename by examining all files in the directory to find all that
fit. Thus, I can redo my command as

cat paper* > newfilename

where paper* expands to {paper.1 paper.2 paper.3 paper.4}. This is one
of the typical virtues of Unix; there are a number of quite helpful
functions. But suppose I had decided to name this new file
"paper.all". After all, this is a pretty logical name, I am combining
the separate individual files into a new one that contains "all" the
previous ones.

cat paper* > paper.all

Disaster. I will probably blow up the system. In this case, paper*
expands to paper.1 paper.2 paper.3 paper.4 paper.all, and so I am
filling up a file from itself:

cat paper.1 paper.2 paper.3 paper.4 paper.all > paper.all

Eventually the file will burst. Does nice friendly Unix check against
this, or at least give a warning? Oh no, that would be against the
policy of Unix. The manual doesn't bother warning against this either,
although it does warn of another, related infelicity: "Beware of 'cat
a b > a' and 'cat b a > a', which destroy the input files before
reading them." Nice of them to tell us.

The command to remove all files that start with the word "paper"

rm paper*

becomes a disaster if a space gets inserted by accident:

rm paper *

for now the file "paper" is removed, as well as every file in the
entire directory (the power of glob). Why is there not a check against
such things? I finally had to alter my version of rm so that when I
said to remove files, they were actually only moved to a special
directory named "deleted" and they didn't actually get deleted until I
logged off. This gave me lots of time for second thoughts and for
catching errors. This also illustrates the power of Unix: what other
operating system would make it so easy for someone to completely
change the operation of a system command for their own personal
satisfaction? This also illustrates the evils of Unix: what other
operating system would make it so necessary to do so? (This is no
longer necessary now that we use Berkeley Unix -- more on this in a
moment.)

The standard text editor is called Ed. What a problem that turned out
to be. It was so lovely that I spent a whole year using it as an
experimental vehicle to see how people dealt with such awful things.
Ed's major property is his shyness; he doesn't like to talk. You
invoke Ed by saying, reasonably enough, "ed". The result is silence:
no response, no prompt, no message, just silence. Novice are never
sure what that silence means. What did they do wrong, they wonder. Why
doesn't Ed say "thank you, here I am" (or at least produce a prompt
character)? No, not Unix with the philosophy that silence is golden.
No response means that everything is ok. If something had gone wrong,
then it would have told you (unless the system died, of course, but
that couldn't happen could it?).

Then there is the famous append mode error. To add text into the
buffer, you have to enter "append mode." To do this, one simply types
"a", followed by RETURN. Now everything that is typed on the terminal
goes into the buffer. (Ed, true to form, does not inform you that it
is now in append mode: when you type "a" followed by "RETURN" the
result is silence, no message, no comment, nothing.) When you are
finished adding text, you are supposed to type a line that "contains
only a . on it." This gets you out of append mode. Want to bet on how
many extra periods got inserted into text files, or how many commands
got inserted into texts, because the users thought that they were in
command mode and forgot they had not left append mode? Does Ed tell
you when you have left append mode? Hah. This problem is so obvious
that even the designers knew about it, but their reaction was to
laugh: "hah-hah, see Joe cry. He just made the append mode error
again." In the tutorial introduction to Ed, written at Bell Labs, the
authors joke about it. Even experienced programmers get screwed this
way, they say, hah hah, isn't that funny. Well, it may be funny to the experienced programmer, but it is devastating to the beginning
secretary or research assistant or student who is trying to use
friendly Unix as a word processor, or as an experimental tool, or just
to learn about computers. Anyone can use Unix says the programmer, all
you need is a sense of humor.

How good is your sense of humor? Suppose you have been working on a
file for an hour and then decide to quit work, exiting Ed by saying
"q". The problem is that Ed would promptly quit. Woof, there went your
last hour's work. Gone forever. Why, if you would have wanted to save
it you would have said so, right? Thank goodness for all those other
people across the country who immediately rewrote the text editor so
that us normal people (who make errors) had some other choices besides
Ed, editors that told you politely when they were working, that would
tell you if they were in append or command mode, and that wouldn't let
you quit without saving your file unless you were first warned, and
then only if you said you really meant it. I could go on.

As I wrote this paper I sent out a message on our networked message
system and asked my colleagues to tell me of their favorite peeves. I
got a lot of responses, but there is no need to go into detail about
them; they all have much the same flavor about them, mostly commenting
about lack of consistency, about the lack of interactive feedback.
Thus, there is no standardization of means to exit programs (and
because the "shell" is just another program as far as the system is
concerned, it is very easy to log yourself off the system by
accident). There are very useful pattern matching features (such as
the "glob" * function), but the shell and the different programs use
the symbols in inconsistent ways. The Unix copy command (cp) and the
related C programming language "stringcopy" (strcpy) have reversed
order of arguments, and Unix move (mv) and copy (cp) operations will
destroy existing files without any warning. Many programs take special "argument flags" but the manner of specifying the flags is
inconsistent, varying from program to program. As I said, I could go
on.

The good news is that we don't use standard Unix: we use Berkeley
Unix. History lists, aliases, a much richer and more intelligent set
of system programs, including a list program, an intelligent screen
editor, a intelligent set of routines for interacting with terminals
according to their capabilities, and a job control that allows one to
stop jobs right in the middle, startup new ones, move things from
background to foreground (and vice versa), examine files, and then
resume jobs. And the shell has been amplified to be a more powerful
programming language, complete with file handling capabilities,
if--then-- else statements, while, case, and all the other goodies of structured programming (see the accompanying box on Unix).

Aliases are worthy of special comment. Aliases let the user tailor the
system to their own needs, naming things in ways they themselves can
remember: self-generated names are indeed easier to remember than
arbitrary names given to you. And aliases allow abbreviations that are meaningful to the individual, without burdening everyone else with
your cleverness or difficulties. To work on this paper, I need only
type the word "unix," for I have set up an alias called "unix" that is
defined to be equal to the correct command to change directories,
combined with a call to the editor (called "vi" for "visual" on this
system) on the file: alias unix "chdir
/csl/norman/papers/CogEngineering; vi unix" These Berkeley Unix
features have proven to be indispensable: the people in my laboratory
would probably refuse to go back to standard Unix.

The bad news is that Berkeley Unix is jury-rigged on top of regular
Unix, so it can only patch up the faults: it can't remedy them. Grep
is not only still grep, but there is an egrep and an fgrep. But worse,
the generators of Berkeley Unix have their problems: if Bell Labs
people are smug and lean, Berkeley people are cute and overweight.
Programs are wordy. Special features proliferate. Aliases -- the
system for setting them up is not easy to for beginners (who may be
the people who need them most). You have to set them up in a file
called .cshrc, a name not chosen to inspire confidence! The "period"
in the filename means that it is invisible -- the normal method of
directory listing programs won't show it. The directory listing
program, ls, comes with 19 possible argument flags, that can be used
singly or in combinations. The number of special files that must be
set up to use all the facilities is horrendus, and they get more
complex with each new release from Berkeley. It is vey difficult on
new users. The program names are cute rather than systematic. Cuteness
is probably better than the lack of meaning of standard Unix, but
there are be limits. The listing program is called "more" (as in,
"give me more"), the program that tells you who is on the system is
called "finger", and a keyword help file -- most helpful by the way --
is called "apropos." Apropos! who can remember that? Especially when
you need it most. I had to make up an alias called "help" which calls
all of the help commands Berkeley provides, but whose names I can
never remember (apropos, whatis, whereis, which).

------------------------------------------------------------------------
The system is now so wordy and so large that it no longer fits on
the smaller machines: our laboratory machine, a DEC 11/45, cannot
hold the latest release of Berkeley Unix (even with a full
complement of memory and a reasonable amount of disc). I write
this paper on a Vax.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

One reader of a draft of this paper -- a systems programmer --
complained bitterly: "Such whining, hand-wringing, and general
bitchiness will cause most people to dismiss it as over-emotional
nonsense. ... The Unix system was originally designed by systems
programmers for their own use and with no intention for others using
it. Other hackers liked it so much that eventually a lot of them
started using it. Word spread about this wonderful system, etc, the
rest you probably know. I think that Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie
could easily shrug their shoulders and say 'But we never intended it
for other than our personal use.'"

All the other users of Unix who have read drafts of this paper agreed
with me. Indeed, their major reaction was to forward examples of
problems that I had not covered. This complaint was unique. I do
sympathize with the spirit of the complaint. He is correct, but ...
The "but" is that the system is nationally distributed, under strict
licensing agreements, with a very high charge to industry, and nominal
charges to educational institutes. Western Electric doesn't mind
getting a profit, but they have not attempted to worry about the
product. If Unix were still what it started to be, a simple experiment
on the development of operating systems, then the complaints I list
could be made in a more friendly, constructive manner. But Unix is
more than that. It is taken as the very model of a proper operating
system. And that is exactly what it is not.

In the development of the system aspects of Unix, the designers have
done a magnificent job. They have been creative, and systematic. A
common theme runs through the development of programs, and by means of
their file structure, the development of "pipes" and "redirection" of
both input and output, plus the power of the iterative "shell"
system-level commands, one can combine system level programs into
self-tailored systems of remarkable power with remarkable ease.

In the development of the user interface aspects of Unix, the
designers have been failures. They have been difficult and derisive. A
common theme runs through the commands: don't be nice to the casual
user -- write the system for the dedicated expert. The system is a
recluse. It uses weird names, and it won't speak to you, not even if
spoken to. For system programmers, Unix is a delight. It is well
structured, with a consistent, powerful philosophy of control and
structure. My complaint is simple: why was not the same effort put
into the design at the level of the user? The answer to my complaint
is a bit more complex. There really are no well known principles of
design at the level of the user interface. So, to remedy the harm that
I may have caused by my heavy-handed sarcasm, let me attempt to
provide some positive suggestions based upon the research that has
been done by me and by others into the principles of the human
information processing system.

Cognitive Engineering is a new discipline, so new that it doesn't
exist: but it ought to. Quite a bit is known about the human
information processing system, enough that we can specify some basic
principles for designers. People are complex entities and can adapt to
almost anything. As a result, designers are often sloppy, for they can
design for themselves without realizing the difficulties that will be
faced by other users. Moreover, there are different levels of users:
people with a large amount of knowledge of the device they are about
to use are quite different from those who lack a basic understanding.
Experts are different than novices. And the expert who is normally
skilled at the use of some systems but who has not used it for awhile
is at a peculiar level of knowledge, neither novice nor expert.

The three most important concepts for system design are these:

1. Be consistent. A fundamental set of principles ought to be
evolved and followed consistently throughout all phases of the
design.

2. Provide the user with an explicit model. Users develop mental
models of the devices with which they interact. If you do not
provide them with one, they will make one up themselves, and the
one they make up is apt to be wrong. Do not count on the user
fully understanding the mechanics of the device. Secretaries and
scientists alike will share a lack of knowledge of a computer
system. The users are not apt to understand the difference between
the buffer, the working memory, the working files, and the
permanent files of a text editor. They are apt to believe that
once they have typed something into the system, it is permanently
in their files. They are apt to expect more intelligence from the
system than the designer knows is there. And they are apt to read
into comments (or the lack of comments) more than you have
intended. Feedback is of critical importance, both in helping to
establish the appropriate mental model and in letting the user
keep its current state in synchrony with the actual system.

3. Provide mnemonic aids. Human memory is a fragile thing.
Actually, for most purposes it is convenient to think of human
memory as consisting of two parts: a short-term memory and a
long-term memory (modern cognitive psychology is developing more
sophisticated notions than this simple two- stage one, but this is
still a valid approximation). Short-term memory is, as the name
suggests, limited in duration and quantity: about five to seven
items is the limit. Thus, do not expect a user to remember the
contents of a message for much longer than it is visible on the
terminal. Long-term memory is robust, but it faces two
difficulties: getting stuff in so that it is properly organized
and getting stuff out, so that it can be found when needed.
Learning is difficult, unless there is a good structure, and it is
visible to the learner. The system designer must provide sensible
assistance to the user so that the material can be structured.
There are lots of sensible memory aids that can be provided, but
the most powerful and sensible of all is understanding. Make a
system so that it can be understood and the memory follows with
ease. Make the command names ones that can be understood, where
the names follow from the function that is desired. If
abbreviations must be used, adopt a consistent policy of forming
the abbreviations. Do not deviate from the policy, even when it
appears that it would be easier for a particular command to
deviate: inconsistency is an evil. Remember the major problem of
any large-scale memory is finding the information that is sought,
even if the information is there someplace. We retrieve things
from memory by starting off with some description of the
information we seek, use that description to enter their memory
system in an attempt to match against the desired information. If
the designer uses cute names and non-standard abbreviations, our
ability to generate a valid description is impaired. As a result,
the person who is not expert and current in the use of the system
is apt to flounder.

There are many ways of formatting information on terminals to provide
useful memory and syntax aids for users. With today's modern
terminals, it is possible to use menus, multiple screens and windows, highlighted areas, and with full duplex systems, automatic or
semi-automatic command completion systems. The principles for these
systems are under active study by a number of groups, but none are
directly relevant to my critique of the UNIX operating system. UNIX is
designed specifically so that it can be used with a wide variety of
terminals, including hard copy terminals.

The problem with Unix is more fundamental. Unix does not provide the
user with a systematic set of principles; it does not provide a
simple, consistent mental model for the user, consistent not only in
the shell but in the major system programs and languages; it does not
provide the user with simple memory aids that can be used to learn the
system structure and then, when one is not completely current in the
use of a particular command, still to be able to retrieve (or better,
derive) what is needed. There are essentially no user help files,
despite the claim that all the documentation is on-line via the
command named man (for manual, of course). But "man" requires you to
know the name of the command you want information about, although it
is the name that is probably just the information you are seeking.

System designers take note. Design the system for the person, not for
the computer, not even for yourself. People are also information
processing systems, with varying degrees of knowledge, varying degrees
of experience. Remember, people's short- term memories are limited in
size, and they learn and retrieve things best when there is a
consistent reason for the name, the function, and the syntax. Friendly
systems treat users as intelligent adults who, like normal adults, are forgetful, distracted, thinking of other things, and not quite as
knowledgeable about the world as they themselves would like to be.
Treat the user with intelligence. There is no need to talk down to the
user, nor to explain everything. But give the user a share in
understanding by presenting a consistent view of the system.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote this post by blinking in Morse code:

A letter by Don Norman, from the days before he became an Apple
Macintosh enthusiast, and GUIs became a widespread thing.

No idea if he is still an Apple enthusiast, or what he thinks about
Apple so proudly touting that its current flagship OS is officially
?Unix??.

----

The truth about Unix: The user interface is horrid
Donald A. Norman
Department of Psychology and Program in Cognitive Science
Center for Human Information Processing
University of California, San Diego
La Jolla, California 92093

(to appear in Datamation)
Norman, D. A. The truth about UNIX. Datamation 27, 12 (1981).

<snip>

Waaaaah waaaaaah UNIX is tooooooo hard to leeearrrrrrrn.

Even back then it was better than fscking DOS.

--
Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian.
-- Robert Orben
Immigration is the sincerest form of flattery.
-- Jack Paar

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Tue, 27 Jan 2026 20:15:36 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

A letter by Don Norman, from the days before he became an Apple
Macintosh enthusiast, and GUIs became a widespread thing.

No idea if he is still an Apple enthusiast, or what he thinks about
Apple so proudly touting that its current flagship OS is officially
?Unix??.

I mean he's pretty on-the-money with most of his complaints, and is
willing to give credit where due. The charge that Unix developers'
approach to UI/UX matters is blinkered and informed almost entirely by
their own preconceptions, in particular, is still broadly applicable to
UI/UX across the whole freenix/FOSS ecosystem to this day.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-27, Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

A letter by Don Norman, from the days before he became an Apple
Macintosh enthusiast, and GUIs became a widespread thing.

<snip>

This is obviously the same Donald A. Norman who wrote
"The Design of Everyday Things", which to this day should
be required reading for all designers, computer or otherwise.

This essay deserves a lot of thought, although I wouldn't
call it perfect. For instance, if he spent as much time
pounding away on a Teletype keyboard as the Unix designers
did, he'd probably be a bit more understanding of the
terseness which resulted.

Yes, command names are inconsistent, even whimsical (e.g. awk).
And there are plenty of gotchas. But I'd gladly put up with
that to deal with Unix internals instead of Windows internals.
(And don't talk to me about CMD.EXE.)

And before we get too far into the GUI wars, let's consider
what has happened to web design. <shudder>

I agree that we should try to come up with a better interface
than what currently exists. But "Ohhhh, shiny" should not be
one of the criteria. I think most people would - in the long
run - appreciate a system which simply does what you want and
then gets out of the way. (As opposed to modern design,
which is based on three words: In Your Face.)

Remember, if you want a wordy interface, why aren't you
programming in COBOL?

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Tue, 27 Jan 2026 16:02:38 -0800, John Ames wrote:

The charge that Unix developers' approach to UI/UX matters is
blinkered and informed almost entirely by their own preconceptions,
in particular, is still broadly applicable to UI/UX across the whole freenix/FOSS ecosystem to this day.

People can, and do, come up with alternatives to those traditional idiosyncratic Unix commands. Just because you haven?t bothered to try
them out, doesn?t mean they don?t exist.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> writes:

Waaaaah waaaaaah UNIX is tooooooo hard to leeearrrrrrrn.

Even back then it was better than fscking DOS.

You're comparing a real, full OS to a home-system toy.

The DEC systems were much more user friendly and the commands were
consistant. DELETE. COPY. RENAME. APPEND. TOPS-20's TYPE command will
stop at the end of your terminal. VMS has TYPE /PAGE to
stop. Directories aren't normally deletable in VMS. If you want to
delete multiple files, you must place commas in between them. Both
systems keep multiple versions/generations for you by default. Do you
need to search a file for a string? Get this - it's called SEARCH.

--
PGP Key ID: 781C A3E2 C6ED 70A6 B356 7AF5 B510 542E D460 5CAE
"The Internet should always be the Wild West!"

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-28, jayjwa <jayjwa@atr2.ath.cx.invalid> wrote:

The DEC systems were much more user friendly and the commands were consistant. DELETE. COPY. RENAME. APPEND. TOPS-20's TYPE command will
stop at the end of your terminal. VMS has TYPE /PAGE to
stop. Directories aren't normally deletable in VMS. If you want to
delete multiple files, you must place commas in between them. Both
systems keep multiple versions/generations for you by default. Do you
need to search a file for a string? Get this - it's called SEARCH.

I do find the name of the TYPE command a bit counterintuitive, though.
Not that "more", or worse, "cat" or "less", is any better.

Niklas
--
"But if you could have removed them at any time..."
"It made everybody feel safer. Besides, I think I kind of liked it after a while."
-- G'Kar and Lyta (B5) after she breaks her handcuffs upon being released

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Tue, 27 Jan 2026 21:00:16 -0500, jayjwa wrote:

The DEC systems were much more user friendly and the commands were consistant.

Trouble is, the original DEC concept of the command line was
fundamentally flawed. CP/M inherited this same concept, and Microsoft
copied it into MS-DOS and even into Windows NT. That?s why there are
real problems trying to do Unix-type things on Windows, even today.

Directories aren't normally deletable in VMS.

That restriction was added later. I remember back in VMS V3, and
possibly V4 as well, there was nothing (apart from easily-changed file protections) to prevent you from deleting a nonempty directory.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 1/27/26 20:24, Niklas Karlsson wrote:

On 2026-01-28, jayjwa <jayjwa@atr2.ath.cx.invalid> wrote:

The DEC systems were much more user friendly and the commands were
consistant. DELETE. COPY. RENAME. APPEND. TOPS-20's TYPE command will
stop at the end of your terminal. VMS has TYPE /PAGE to
stop. Directories aren't normally deletable in VMS. If you want to
delete multiple files, you must place commas in between them. Both
systems keep multiple versions/generations for you by default. Do you
need to search a file for a string? Get this - it's called SEARCH.

I do find the name of the TYPE command a bit counterintuitive, though.
Not that "more", or worse, "cat" or "less", is any better.

These days you don't need to use any commands. If you do, Linux is light
years ahead of windows in console usability, but in terms strictly of
GUI usage I'd rate the two systems about equal. In fact, Linux comes out
ahead because it is more orthogonal.I keep running into weirdness in
windows like "what do you mean I can't cut this text"?

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Tue, 27 Jan 2026 21:41:59 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

If you do, Linux is light years ahead of windows in console
usability, but in terms strictly of GUI usage I'd rate the two
systems about equal.

Worth noting that Linux is the only system in common use which gives
you a choice of GUIs.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> writes:

Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote this post by blinking in Morse code:

A letter by Don Norman, from the days before he became an Apple
Macintosh enthusiast, and GUIs became a widespread thing.

No idea if he is still an Apple enthusiast, or what he thinks about
Apple so proudly touting that its current flagship OS is officially
?Unix??.

----

The truth about Unix: The user interface is horrid
Donald A. Norman
Department of Psychology and Program in Cognitive Science
Center for Human Information Processing
University of California, San Diego
La Jolla, California 92093

(to appear in Datamation)
Norman, D. A. The truth about UNIX. Datamation 27, 12 (1981).

<snip>

Waaaaah waaaaaah UNIX is tooooooo hard to leeearrrrrrrn.

Even back then it was better than fscking DOS.

It does appear to be an empty, petty criticism doesn't it? I mean he
wrote that long winded analysis while teenaged college students
were eargerly learning unix by the droves without much issue and plenty finesse. Makes him seem half-rate through that lense.

I never been a unix guy despite my past. Went from DOS > Windows 98 >
Linux. I use windows only for work, as it's mandated. It's fine I
guess. Im in Teams meetings all the time and anything I do, workwise, is
inside a putty screen or doing diagrams.

Not sure what drives the apple cult, to be honest. I worked for the
company during college and gleefully surrendered my badge when real
careeer prospects presented themselves. The company demanded more from
the employees than the salaries would indicate. They would just say 'hey
look you can put apple on your resume.' All this told future employers
is that you're a sucker who won't ever try to negotiate a higher salary.

After my first big industry job, the first thing to be deleted on the
resume was Apple and associated references. It was more of a stain.

The only thing I got from that experience, other than a deep dislike for
the company, is a close friendship with my old manager.

My current dream machine, no joke, is a color maximite 2.

D
sysop : air & wave bbs
finger : calcmandan@bbs.erb.pw

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Tue, 27 Jan 2026 21:32:13 -0800, Daniel wrote:

It does appear to be an empty, petty criticism doesn't it? I mean he
wrote that long winded analysis while teenaged college students were
eargerly learning unix by the droves without much issue and plenty
finesse. Makes him seem half-rate through that lense.

I do find it odd that he was taught to use ?cat? to look at files --
surely the ?more? command was already available at the time, and
provided the screenful-at-a-time display that he clearly felt was
lacking.

As for dealing with files with strange characters in their names --
the ?dsw? command he mentioned is not needed any more, and I don?t
think anything like it even exists on current *nix systems. The usual file-manipulation commands, running under current POSIX-compatible
shells, are quite able to do the job.

And of course GUIs are commonplace now, so ordinary users can happily
avoid the command line for all the ordinary-user stuff. At least on
Linux and other *nix systems. That probably answers the bulk of his
criticisms, I think he would agree.

Oh, and that weird ?ed? editor is still available as part of the GNU
tools, for those who really want to use it. Thankfully it is far from
the only choice available -- and I?ve certainly never felt the need to
come close enough to touch it with a ten-foot pole.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

jayjwa wrote this post by blinking in Morse code:

Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> writes:

Waaaaah waaaaaah UNIX is tooooooo hard to leeearrrrrrrn.

Even back then it was better than fscking DOS.

You're comparing a real, full OS to a home-system toy.

Yes, what they used to call a "Billy Box".

The DEC systems were much more user friendly and the commands were consistant. DELETE. COPY. RENAME. APPEND. TOPS-20's TYPE command will
stop at the end of your terminal. VMS has TYPE /PAGE to
stop. Directories aren't normally deletable in VMS. If you want to
delete multiple files, you must place commas in between them. Both
systems keep multiple versions/generations for you by default. Do you
need to search a file for a string? Get this - it's called SEARCH.

:-D "User-friendly" :-D

I used TOPS-10 on a time-sharing terminal. Mostly to edit programs
and to write my dissertation.

I used IIRC the RSX-11 system on two different lab computers.

When I got started with UNIX (on a PDP-11 in grad school), guess
what? If I got stuck, I would ask questions.

On all systems, you figure it out and then you get familiar with
it.

Nowadays I use "man -k" or I goo-goo for the info.

--
<Manoj> shaleh: I am not, despite your implication, God

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-28, Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> wrote:

On all systems, you figure it out and then you get familiar with
it.

Nowadays I use "man -k" or I goo-goo for the info.

When I started out with *nix, I had read somewhere about the "apropos"
command, so that stuck in my muscle memory for a long time despite being
harder to type and less obvious than "man -k". I _think_ I've disabused
myself of that habit by now.

Niklas
--
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet?

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote this post by blinking in Morse code:

On Tue, 27 Jan 2026 21:32:13 -0800, Daniel wrote:

It does appear to be an empty, petty criticism doesn't it? I mean he
wrote that long winded analysis while teenaged college students were
eargerly learning unix by the droves without much issue and plenty
finesse. Makes him seem half-rate through that lense.

I do find it odd that he was taught to use ?cat? to look at files --
surely the ?more? command was already available at the time, and
provided the screenful-at-a-time display that he clearly felt was
lacking.

As for dealing with files with strange characters in their names --
the ?dsw? command he mentioned is not needed any more, and I don?t
think anything like it even exists on current *nix systems. The usual file-manipulation commands, running under current POSIX-compatible
shells, are quite able to do the job.

And of course GUIs are commonplace now, so ordinary users can happily
avoid the command line for all the ordinary-user stuff. At least on
Linux and other *nix systems. That probably answers the bulk of his criticisms, I think he would agree.

Oh, and that weird ?ed? editor is still available as part of the GNU
tools, for those who really want to use it. Thankfully it is far from
the only choice available -- and I?ve certainly never felt the need to
come close enough to touch it with a ten-foot pole.

How about TECO? :-)

I had a job writing assembler code for DOS machines for a
classified ad system. The editor of choice was... EDLIN.
Very painful to page to where you wanted to go in a 1Mb file.

I showed them PC vi, but though faster to use, it took awhile to
load a 1Mb file (obviously building an index into the file), so
was categorically rejected.

My boss (from a different company) cued me onto VEDIT, which was
nicer but had a tendency to reverse all the character in its buffer.
:-D

--
Scientists are people who build the Brooklyn Bridge and then buy it.
-- William Buckley

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

In article <unix-20260128130650@ram.dialup.fu-berlin.de>,
Stefan Ram <ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

Niklas Karlsson <nikke.karlsson@gmail.com> wrote or quoted:

I do find the name of the TYPE command a bit counterintuitive, though.
Not that "more", or worse, "cat" or "less", is any better.

This is probably a textbook case of bikeshedding. For people
who aren't into this stuff, the first thing that clicks for
them are the command names, so that's what they end up talking
about. Doesn't mean it's wrong to talk about command names.

Still, you could say that a name like "rm" instead of "remove"
is quicker to type and helps avoid the mistake of thinking you
can just use the command word like the regular English verb.

And that was the original motivation, of course.

Multics had a concept of an official name for a command, and
then a short version. So to list the contents of the current
working directory, one might run the `list` command:

```
list

Segments = 14, Lengths = 11.

r w 1 foo.fortran
...
r w 0 card_input.acs

r 09:26 0.073 0
```

But this command could also be invoked with the short name `ls`:

```
ls

Segments = 14, Lengths = 11.

r w 1 foo.fortran
...
r w 0 card_input.acs

r 09:27 0.074 0
```

When Unix was written, they were using slow teletype terminals
and this actually mattered, quite a lot. Thus, Unix commands
had names that were short and easy to type, though cryptic if
you weren't familiar with them, or the surrounding jargon; this
mirrored Multics, but without the option for the long name.

An astute reader will notice a number of similarities to the
short names of common Multics commands (`ls`, `cp`, `mv`, and so
on), but also a number of differences: on Multics, the
equivalent of `rm` is `delete` (short name `dl`); the Multics
equivalent of `cat` is similyarly `print` (not to be confused
with printing to a line printer). `chdir` (aka `cd`) is spelled
`cwd` on Multics and `pwd` is `wd`. `man` is `help`.

- Dan C.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 1/27/26 21:45, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:

On Tue, 27 Jan 2026 21:41:59 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

If you do, Linux is light years ahead of windows in console
usability, but in terms strictly of GUI usage I'd rate the two
systems about equal.

Worth noting that Linux is the only system in common use which gives
you a choice of GUIs.

As someone who uses an alternative GUI (Mate), I think this is great,
but in general it's confusing to would-be new users.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 1/27/26 22:32, Daniel wrote:

Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> writes:

Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote this post by blinking in Morse code:

A letter by Don Norman, from the days before he became an Apple
Macintosh enthusiast, and GUIs became a widespread thing.

No idea if he is still an Apple enthusiast, or what he thinks about
Apple so proudly touting that its current flagship OS is officially
?Unix??.

----

The truth about Unix: The user interface is horrid
Donald A. Norman
Department of Psychology and Program in Cognitive Science
Center for Human Information Processing
University of California, San Diego
La Jolla, California 92093

(to appear in Datamation)
Norman, D. A. The truth about UNIX. Datamation 27, 12 (1981).

<snip>

Waaaaah waaaaaah UNIX is tooooooo hard to leeearrrrrrrn.

Even back then it was better than fscking DOS.

It does appear to be an empty, petty criticism doesn't it? I mean he
wrote that long winded analysis while teenaged college students
were eargerly learning unix by the droves without much issue and plenty finesse. Makes him seem half-rate through that lense.

I never been a unix guy despite my past. Went from DOS > Windows 98 >
Linux. I use windows only for work, as it's mandated. It's fine I
guess. Im in Teams meetings all the time and anything I do, workwise, is inside a putty screen or doing diagrams.

I went from DOS > OS/2 > Linux, with a short diversion thru Minix. Wife
runs windows, so I've had to play with that a little, but never was an
actual windows user. I was a mainframe sysprog, and my job didn't
involve PCs, so I managed to stick with OS/2 at work until I left.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 1/28/26 05:07, Stefan Ram wrote:

Niklas Karlsson <nikke.karlsson@gmail.com> wrote or quoted:

I do find the name of the TYPE command a bit counterintuitive, though.
Not that "more", or worse, "cat" or "less", is any better.

This is probably a textbook case of bikeshedding. For people
who aren't into this stuff, the first thing that clicks for
them are the command names, so that's what they end up talking
about. Doesn't mean it's wrong to talk about command names.

Still, you could say that a name like "rm" instead of "remove"
is quicker to type and helps avoid the mistake of thinking you
can just use the command word like the regular English verb.

If you were really concerned, I guess you could set up aliases for
commands. Several times I've been tempted to alias "del" to "rm".

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-28, Dan Cross <cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net> wrote:

the Multics equivalent of `cat` is similyarly `print` (not to be
confused with printing to a line printer).

Could Multics `print` also concatenate files, which is after all where
the name `cat` comes from?

Niklas
--
I was commenting to a co-worker just yesterday that I find the last 20% of projects the most interesting and a former manager, the first 20% of projects, so we would always compromise and work on the middle 60% of the project and both of us would be miserable. -- Russ Allbery

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

jayjwa <jayjwa@atr2.ath.cx.invalid> writes:

Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> writes:

Waaaaah waaaaaah UNIX is tooooooo hard to leeearrrrrrrn.

Even back then it was better than fscking DOS.

You're comparing a real, full OS to a home-system toy.

The DEC systems were much more user friendly and the commands were >consistant. DELETE. COPY. RENAME. APPEND.

.R PIP

User friendly?

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) writes:

In article <unix-20260128130650@ram.dialup.fu-berlin.de>,
Stefan Ram <ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

Niklas Karlsson <nikke.karlsson@gmail.com> wrote or quoted:

I do find the name of the TYPE command a bit counterintuitive, though. >>>Not that "more", or worse, "cat" or "less", is any better.

This is probably a textbook case of bikeshedding. For people
who aren't into this stuff, the first thing that clicks for
them are the command names, so that's what they end up talking
about. Doesn't mean it's wrong to talk about command names.

Still, you could say that a name like "rm" instead of "remove"
is quicker to type and helps avoid the mistake of thinking you
can just use the command word like the regular English verb.

And that was the original motivation, of course.

Multics had a concept of an official name for a command, and
then a short version. So to list the contents of the current
working directory, one might run the `list` command:

<snip description of list vs. ls on Multics>


DEC's VMS supported abbreviating commands
to the shortest unique first characters of the command name.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-28, Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> wrote:

DEC's VMS supported abbreviating commands
to the shortest unique first characters of the command name.

And appears to have been an inspiration for the Cisco IOS CLI, where you
can do the same thing. Also you'll go "show X" much the same as you
would in VMS to get the status for something.

*nix shells eventually evolved completion, which is at least a coarse approximation of the abbreviation ability, at least for the part of the
command that is an actual executable... though you can program it to do
more if you put enough effort in.

Niklas
--
"So after I specifically asked you not to touch anything, you drank a bottle of strange blue liquid? It could've been poisonous acid!"
"It could've been, but chances were equally good it was an emperor."
-- Leela and Fry, Futurama

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

I do find it odd that he was taught to use ?cat? to look at files --
surely the ?more? command was already available at the time, and
provided the screenful-at-a-time display that he clearly felt was
lacking.

And what of "pg"? Everyone is taught "cat" but no one mentions "pg". It
had to have been around back then. My Linux verson is util-linux, but my Sun/illumos one has a man page dated 1996.

As for dealing with files with strange characters in their names --
the ?dsw? command he mentioned is not needed any more, and I don?t
think anything like it even exists on current *nix systems.

It probably stood for "delete stupid words", or possibly, the initials
of the programmer's name. TOPS-10 has DELFIL, which was so kindly
pointed out to me, to delete directories out of [1,1] which are normally
not killable via "del".

Oh, and that weird ?ed? editor is still available as part of the GNU
tools, for those who really want to use it. Thankfully it is far from
the only choice available -- and I?ve certainly never felt the need to
come close enough to touch it with a ten-foot pole.

.sos ed.txt
Creating ED.TXT
00100 /bin/ed is a bit like TOPS-10's "sos" or maybe TOPS-20's "edit"
00200 but ever so slightly less user-friendly. I recall DOS had a
00300 scrolly editor so that you didn't have to use "edline" but
00400 I've since forgotten its name. Maybe it was just "edit". This
00500 was around the time Turbo Pascal and Quick BASIC were out.
00600 $
*e
[DSKB:ED.TXT]


--
PGP Key ID: 781C A3E2 C6ED 70A6 B356 7AF5 B510 542E D460 5CAE
"The Internet should always be the Wild West!"

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Niklas Karlsson wrote this post by blinking in Morse code:

On 2026-01-28, Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> wrote:

DEC's VMS supported abbreviating commands
to the shortest unique first characters of the command name.

And appears to have been an inspiration for the Cisco IOS CLI, where you
can do the same thing. Also you'll go "show X" much the same as you
would in VMS to get the status for something.

*nix shells eventually evolved completion, which is at least a coarse approximation of the abbreviation ability, at least for the part of the command that is an actual executable... though you can program it to do
more if you put enough effort in.

Niklas

I use cdargs for directory completion/book-marking allatime.

--
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some
poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi.
-- Larry Wall in the perl man page

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Peter Flass wrote this post by blinking in Morse code:

On 1/28/26 05:07, Stefan Ram wrote:

Niklas Karlsson <nikke.karlsson@gmail.com> wrote or quoted:

I do find the name of the TYPE command a bit counterintuitive, though.
Not that "more", or worse, "cat" or "less", is any better.

This is probably a textbook case of bikeshedding. For people
who aren't into this stuff, the first thing that clicks for
them are the command names, so that's what they end up talking
about. Doesn't mean it's wrong to talk about command names.

Still, you could say that a name like "rm" instead of "remove"
is quicker to type and helps avoid the mistake of thinking you
can just use the command word like the regular English verb.

If you were really concerned, I guess you could set up aliases for
commands. Several times I've been tempted to alias "del" to "rm".

I thought about using del to mv the file(s) to ~/.trash. I mv them
to ~/tmp and periodically clean that out.

--
Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night as Cleopatra and sank.
-- John Mason Brown, drama critic

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Peter Flass wrote this post by blinking in Morse code:

On 1/27/26 22:32, Daniel wrote:

Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> writes:

I never been a unix guy despite my past. Went from DOS > Windows 98 >
Linux. I use windows only for work, as it's mandated. It's fine I
guess. Im in Teams meetings all the time and anything I do, workwise, is
inside a putty screen or doing diagrams.

I went from DOS > OS/2 > Linux, with a short diversion thru Minix. Wife
runs windows, so I've had to play with that a little, but never was an actual windows user. I was a mainframe sysprog, and my job didn't
involve PCs, so I managed to stick with OS/2 at work until I left.

My history from the very beginning:

- PDP-8/e "EduSystem" in high-school, starting with
hollerith cards marked with a number 2 pencil, then on to
the teletype with paper tape. BASIC.
- In early college, some unknown time-sharing system,
learning Algol. Later a DEC system and a DECwriter.
- Transferred to another school and learned FORTRAN.
- In grad school:
- DEC-10 and TOPS-10. Used Pascal for a class, and
some document system akin to troff to write the
dissertation.
- Commodore VIC-20 with a modem cartrige, cassette tape
drive, and a black & white TV to access the univerity
computer.
- PDP-11, RT-11, and FORTRAN to drive lab equipment.
- PDP-11, RSX-11, and FORTRAN to drive a pen plotter.
- First job:
- Commodore 64.
- Atari ST. Used it a lot with MIDI.
- Some HP system with a funky file-naming convention.
- PC-DOS with MS-FORTRAN and Lattice C.
- Next job:
- SunOS, C code.
- MS-DOS and assembler.
- More jobs, more DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT,
Windows 2000, Windows XP. Also RedHat Linux, then Debian.
Windows 10, and currently a dual boot Debian/Win11 and
a laptop with Arch. C, C++ C#, SQL.

Ye gods, going through those memories makes me feel very old.
And I'm sure many many people have gone through far more systems
and languages than that.

--
* liw prefers not to have Linus run Debian, because then /me would
have to run Red Hat, just to keep the power balance :)
-- #Debian

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

jayjwa <jayjwa@atr2.ath.cx.invalid> writes:

the ?dsw? command he mentioned is not needed any more, and I don?t
think anything like it even exists on current *nix systems.

It probably stood for "delete stupid words", or possibly, the initials
of the programmer's name.

dsw is "delete from switches". The original PDP-7 version used the
console switches for confirmation rather than the terminal:

https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix/blob/master/src/cmd/dsw.s

("oas" is "OR accumulator with switches".)

--
Adam Sampson <ats@offog.org> <http://offog.org/>

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Niklas Karlsson <nikke.karlsson@gmail.com> writes:

Could Multics `print` also concatenate files, which is after all where
the name `cat` comes from?

Yes, although it's a little clunkier than Unix. On ICM's Multics system:

| fo text_hello; string Hello; ro
| r 11:51 0.022 1
|
| fo text_goodbye; string Goodbye; ro
| r 11:51 0.022 1
|
| fo text_both; print -no_header text_hello text_goodbye; ro
| r 11:51 0.047 1
|
| print text_both
|
| text_both 01/28/26 1151.2 pst Wed
|
|
| Hello
| Goodbye
|
|
| r 11:51 0.031 0

"fo filename" redirects standard output to filename; "ro" unredirects
it. "string" is like echo. "print" prints a header before each file by
default, as you can see at the bottom; "-no_header" suppresses it.

--
Adam Sampson <ats@offog.org> <http://offog.org/>

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

jayjwa <jayjwa@atr2.ath.cx.invalid> writes:

Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

I do find it odd that he was taught to use ?cat? to look at files --
surely the ?more? command was already available at the time, and
provided the screenful-at-a-time display that he clearly felt was
lacking.

And what of "pg"? Everyone is taught "cat" but no one mentions "pg". It
had to have been around back then. My Linux verson is util-linux, but my >Sun/illumos one has a man page dated 1996.

The pg(1) utility appears to have first been included in Unix V10 (1989)
and was included in SVR4 and successor USL distributions (e.g. unixware).

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> writes:

Peter Flass wrote this post by blinking in Morse code:

On 1/27/26 22:32, Daniel wrote:

Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> writes:

I never been a unix guy despite my past. Went from DOS > Windows 98 >
Linux. I use windows only for work, as it's mandated. It's fine I
guess. Im in Teams meetings all the time and anything I do, workwise, is >>> inside a putty screen or doing diagrams.

I went from DOS > OS/2 > Linux, with a short diversion thru Minix. Wife
runs windows, so I've had to play with that a little, but never was an
actual windows user. I was a mainframe sysprog, and my job didn't
involve PCs, so I managed to stick with OS/2 at work until I left.

My history from the very beginning:

- PDP-8/e "EduSystem" in high-school, starting with
hollerith cards marked with a number 2 pencil, then on to
the teletype with paper tape. BASIC.

TSS 8.24 over a dialin ASR-33 for me.

- In early college, some unknown time-sharing system,
learning Algol.

Almost certainly Burroughs B5x00/B6x00 with CANDE.

Later a DEC system and a DECwriter.

Undergrad: Unix v6 (11/34), MVS (Itel AS/6) and VMS (VAX 11/780)

- First job:

Burroughs B4800/B[234]900 mainframes (OS developer for Burroughs)
We used a VAX 11/750 running simula for architectural simulation

Various other systems after the merger (Univac 2200, etc).

Second Job:

SGI Origin, Indy, Octane (IRIX development)

SGI started to pivot to linux around 1998, and I've been
working on or with linux ever since.

Have never had to use windows aside from a side-gig in
the mid 90's where I was contracted to write two NT 3.51
drivers (Optical WORM disk and associated Jukebox controller).

Hated Visual Studio and the microsoft development environment
with a passion.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 1/28/26 13:19, Scott Lurndal wrote:
What used to drive me nuts, and still does occasionally, is that I want
to use "type" instead of "cat" to display a file on my terminal.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Niklas Karlsson <nikke.karlsson@gmail.com> writes:

On 2026-01-28, Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> wrote:

DEC's VMS supported abbreviating commands
to the shortest unique first characters of the command name.

And appears to have been an inspiration for the Cisco IOS CLI, where you
can do the same thing. Also you'll go "show X" much the same as you
would in VMS to get the status for something.

Both VMS and Cisco IOS got the idea from TENEX/TOPS-20 on the PDP-10.

*nix shells eventually evolved completion, which is at least a coarse approximation of the abbreviation ability, at least for the part of the command that is an actual executable... though you can program it to do
more if you put enough effort in.

The first Unix shell to do so was tcsh, "TENEX C shell".

I believe my a.f.c. post regarding the history of this feature is still found in the tcsh man page, as one of the Berkeley or Sun folks asked my permission to include it...

--
Rich Alderson news@alderson.users.panix.com
Audendum est, et veritas investiganda; quam etiamsi non assequamur,
omnino tamen proprius, quam nunc sumus, ad eam perveniemus.
--Galen

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

And what of "pg"? Everyone is taught "cat" but no one mentions "pg". It
had to have been around back then. My Linux verson is util-linux, but my Sun/illumos one has a man page dated 1996.

more(1) appeared in west coast unix. It appears that it was written at Berkeley in 1978.

pg(1) appeared in east coast unix. It is first documented in Research
v8, best I can tell. It's now been removed from the POSIX spec, and at
least some Linux distros have quit building it in the util-linux
package.

My general read of the unix world is that the BSD universe attracted
more mindshare than the Bell universe.

I continue to lament that more people involved in wrecking Linux haven't
read the old Labs unix papers and books.

De

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Peter Flass <Peter@Iron-Spring.com> writes:

On 1/28/26 13:19, Scott Lurndal wrote:
What used to drive me nuts, and still does occasionally, is that I want
to use "type" instead of "cat" to display a file on my terminal.

You can always alias 'type' to 'cat'. Although that will override
a korn shell builtin-command called 'type'.

$ type xrn
xrn is a function


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Wed, 28 Jan 2026 21:50:39 +0000, Dennis Boone wrote:

more(1) appeared in west coast unix. It appears that it was written
at Berkeley in 1978.

I keep wondering why distros don?t get rid of ?more?, and rename
?less? to ?more? ... but in the meantime ...

export PAGER='less -iX -x4'
alias more="$PAGER"

I continue to lament that more people involved in wrecking Linux
haven't read the old Labs unix papers and books.

You?d think lamenting and wishing would be enough to make the code
write itself, wouldn?t you ...

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 28 Jan 2026 12:07:54 GMT, Stefan Ram wrote:

Still, you could say that a name like "rm" instead of "remove" is
quicker to type ...

Some might say that?s more of a bug than a feature ...

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

According to Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us>:

The truth about Unix: The user interface is horrid
Donald A. Norman

Waaaaah waaaaaah UNIX is tooooooo hard to leeearrrrrrrn.

Mike Lesk wrote a rather testy reply in which he pointed out that
the "more natural" commands Norman preferred were the ones on the
PDP-10 he was accustomed to.

Someone wrote a paper I can no longer find in which they tried some
experiments with different commands do see how usable a bunch of naive
users found them. Unsurprisingly, they found it was about the same
either way.

R's,
John

--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 28 Jan 2026 18:31:45 GMT, Niklas Karlsson wrote:

*nix shells eventually evolved completion, which is at least a
coarse approximation of the abbreviation ability ...

And also applies to other things, like file names.

In fact, command-name expansion only works because it matches an
existing file name.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

jayjwa wrote this post by blinking in Morse code:

Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

I do find it odd that he was taught to use ?cat? to look at files --
surely the ?more? command was already available at the time, and
provided the screenful-at-a-time display that he clearly felt was
lacking.

And what of "pg"? Everyone is taught "cat" but no one mentions "pg". It
had to have been around back then. My Linux verson is util-linux, but my Sun/illumos one has a man page dated 1996.

Wow! I learned something new!

pg!

--
vi is [[13~^[[15~^[[15~^[[19~^[[18~^ a
muk[^[[29~^[[34~^[[26~^[[32~^ch better editor than this emacs. I know I^[[14~'ll get flamed for this but the truth has to be
said. ^[[D^[[D^[[D^[[D ^[[D^[^[[D^[[D^[[B^
exit ^X^C quit :x :wq dang it :w:w:w :x ^C^C^Z^D
-- Jesper Lauridsen <rorschak@daimi.aau.dk> from alt.religion.emacs

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Adam Sampson wrote this post by blinking in Morse code:

jayjwa <jayjwa@atr2.ath.cx.invalid> writes:

the ?dsw? command he mentioned is not needed any more, and I don?t
think anything like it even exists on current *nix systems.

It probably stood for "delete stupid words", or possibly, the initials
of the programmer's name.

dsw is "delete from switches". The original PDP-7 version used the
console switches for confirmation rather than the terminal:

https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix/blob/master/src/cmd/dsw.s

("oas" is "OR accumulator with switches".)

Heh, in high school I learned to toggle a boot sequence on the
console (front panel) of the PDP-8. Me and another guy learned how
to toggle in programs to redirect input to a device like the tty.

--
He that bringeth a present, findeth the door open.
-- Scottish proverb.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Dennis Boone wrote this post by blinking in Morse code:

And what of "pg"? Everyone is taught "cat" but no one mentions "pg". It
had to have been around back then. My Linux verson is util-linux, but my Sun/illumos one has a man page dated 1996.

more(1) appeared in west coast unix. It appears that it was written at Berkeley in 1978.

pg(1) appeared in east coast unix. It is first documented in Research
v8, best I can tell. It's now been removed from the POSIX spec, and at
least some Linux distros have quit building it in the util-linux
package.

Arch Linux includes it.

My general read of the unix world is that the BSD universe attracted
more mindshare than the Bell universe.

I continue to lament that more people involved in wrecking Linux haven't
read the old Labs unix papers and books.

A friend of mine who worked at AT&T for awhile sent me a big-ass
hardcopy manual of the man pages. I couldn't really grok it all at
that time.

--
Don't take life seriously, you'll never get out alive.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Scott Lurndal wrote this post by blinking in Morse code:

<snip>

Hated Visual Studio and the microsoft development environment
with a passion.

I didn't hate it, but found it pretty rococo, clumsy, and
dictatorial, enforcing some really stupid directory conventions,
and ill-suited to the original 256-char limit to directory
lengths.

--
Are you a parent? Do you sometimes find yourself unsure as to what to
say in those awkward situations? Worry no more...

You wouldn't understand.
You ask too many questions.
In order to be a man, you have to learn to follow orders.
That's for me to know and you to find out.
Don't let those bullies push you around. Go in there and stick
up for yourself.
You're acting too big for your britches.
Well, you broke it. Now are you satisfied?
Wait till your father gets home.
Bored? If you're bored, I've got some chores for you.
Shape up or ship out.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 28 Jan 2026 15:21:20 GMT, Niklas Karlsson wrote:

Could Multics `print` also concatenate files, which is after all
where the name `cat` comes from?

Some descriptions of early Unix mention that there was also a ?dog?
command in addition to ?cat?. Though what it did was never described,
and nothing remotely resembling that name seems to exist on current
*nix systems.

Presumably it was some kind of file-concatenation utility somewhat
like cat, perhaps with additional features, but who knows ...

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Wed, 28 Jan 2026 08:00:29 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

On 1/27/26 21:45, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:

On Tue, 27 Jan 2026 21:41:59 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

If you do, Linux is light years ahead of windows in console
usability, but in terms strictly of GUI usage I'd rate the two
systems about equal.

Worth noting that Linux is the only system in common use which
gives you a choice of GUIs.

As someone who uses an alternative GUI (Mate), I think this is
great, but in general it's confusing to would-be new users.

The only reason why I think it would be ?confusing? is because it
offers them a choice they never had before. Like a defector from the
Soviet Union bewildered by the range of choices on show in a typical
Capitalist supermarket.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:29:41 GMT
Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:

And before we get too far into the GUI wars, let's consider what has
happened to web design. <shudder>

I agree that we should try to come up with a better interface than
what currently exists. But "Ohhhh, shiny" should not be one of the
criteria. I think most people would - in the long run - appreciate a
system which simply does what you want and then gets out of the way.
(As opposed to modern design, which is based on three words: In Your
Face.)

There's a balance to be struck, definitely - visual glitz or command
verbosity for its own sake aren't helpful, but neither are inscrutably
Spartan GUI designs or extreme terseness on the command line. Unfortun-
ately, few developers seem to be much interested in seeking balance :/


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Wed, 28 Jan 2026 01:52:19 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

The charge that Unix developers' approach to UI/UX matters is
blinkered and informed almost entirely by their own preconceptions,
in particular, is still broadly applicable to UI/UX across the whole freenix/FOSS ecosystem to this day.

People can, and do, come up with alternatives to those traditional idiosyncratic Unix commands. Just because you haven?t bothered to

try

them out, doesn?t mean they don?t exist.

They sure do - unfortunately, they're usually done by people with the
same essential mindset, who merely happen to have a different set of
personal preconceptions and idiosyncracies.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Wed, 28 Jan 2026 15:51:22 GMT
scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) wrote:

The DEC systems were much more user friendly and the commands were consistant. DELETE. COPY. RENAME. APPEND.

.R PIP

User friendly?

Yeah, that's a statement that deserves some qualification XD


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Wed, 28 Jan 2026 16:12:58 -0800, John Ames wrote:

On Wed, 28 Jan 2026 01:52:19 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

The charge that Unix developers' approach to UI/UX matters is
blinkered and informed almost entirely by their own
preconceptions, in particular, is still broadly applicable to
UI/UX across the whole freenix/FOSS ecosystem to this day.

People can, and do, come up with alternatives to those traditional
idiosyncratic Unix commands. Just because you haven?t bothered to
try them out, doesn?t mean they don?t exist.

They sure do - unfortunately, they're usually done by people with
the same essential mindset, who merely happen to have a different
set of personal preconceptions and idiosyncracies.

Feel free to show us how you would do better.

.

.

.

.

.

.

(crickets)

.

.

.

.

.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 1/28/26 15:26, John Levine wrote:

According to Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us>:

The truth about Unix: The user interface is horrid
Donald A. Norman

Waaaaah waaaaaah UNIX is tooooooo hard to leeearrrrrrrn.

Mike Lesk wrote a rather testy reply in which he pointed out that
the "more natural" commands Norman preferred were the ones on the
PDP-10 he was accustomed to.

Someone wrote a paper I can no longer find in which they tried some experiments with different commands do see how usable a bunch of naive
users found them. Unsurprisingly, they found it was about the same
either way.

The problem arises with people who are used to a set of commands and
then have to switch to something else.



--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 1/28/26 16:45, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:

On 28 Jan 2026 15:21:20 GMT, Niklas Karlsson wrote:

Could Multics `print` also concatenate files, which is after all
where the name `cat` comes from?

Some descriptions of early Unix mention that there was also a ?dog?
command in addition to ?cat?. Though what it did was never described,
and nothing remotely resembling that name seems to exist on current
*nix systems.

Presumably it was some kind of file-concatenation utility somewhat
like cat, perhaps with additional features, but who knows ...

Maybe it just barked. Burroughs 5500 MCP has a SPO (console) command EI,
and all it did was reply EIO.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-28, Peter Flass <Peter@Iron-Spring.com> wrote:

What used to drive me nuts, and still does occasionally, is that I want
to use "type" instead of "cat" to display a file on my terminal.

Not me. I install a set of Linux-like utilities on any Windows box
that I use, so I have cat, mv, rm, etc.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-28, Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> wrote:

jayjwa <jayjwa@atr2.ath.cx.invalid> writes:

Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

I do find it odd that he was taught to use ?cat? to look at files --
surely the ?more? command was already available at the time, and
provided the screenful-at-a-time display that he clearly felt was
lacking.

And what of "pg"? Everyone is taught "cat" but no one mentions "pg". It
had to have been around back then. My Linux verson is util-linux, but my
Sun/illumos one has a man page dated 1996.

The pg(1) utility appears to have first been included in Unix V10 (1989)
and was included in SVR4 and successor USL distributions (e.g. unixware).

Oh yeah, pg. I forgot about that one. It's been a long time.

It bothers me that recent Linux versions of more have changed their
behaviour so that you have to type magic keystrokes to move to the
next file in a wildcard group, or to get out of it at all.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-28, Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> wrote:

Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote this post by blinking in Morse code:

Oh, and that weird ?ed? editor is still available as part of the GNU
tools, for those who really want to use it. Thankfully it is far from
the only choice available -- and I?ve certainly never felt the need to
come close enough to touch it with a ten-foot pole.

My only connection with ed is that I use :x in vim to save and quit.

How about TECO? :-)

I had a job writing assembler code for DOS machines for a
classified ad system. The editor of choice was... EDLIN.
Very painful to page to where you wanted to go in a 1Mb file.

I found that edlin was just enough like CP/M's ed to feel familiar,
and just enough different to bite you.

I showed them PC vi, but though faster to use, it took awhile to
load a 1Mb file (obviously building an index into the file), so
was categorically rejected.

My boss (from a different company) cued me onto VEDIT, which was
nicer but had a tendency to reverse all the character in its buffer.
:-D

My editor of choice in my MS-DOS days was KEDIT.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-29, John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, 28 Jan 2026 15:51:22 GMT
scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) wrote:

The DEC systems were much more user friendly and the commands were
consistant. DELETE. COPY. RENAME. APPEND.

.R PIP

User friendly?

Yeah, that's a statement that deserves some qualification XD

"Unix is user-friendly - it's just picky about who its friends are."
-- Anon.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-28, Daniel <me@sc1f1dan.com> wrote:

Not sure what drives the apple cult, to be honest.

And that's what it is, innit? See my .sig.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Microsoft is a dictatorship.
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | Apple is a cult.
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | Linux is anarchy.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | Pick your poison.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Thu, 29 Jan 2026 06:30:38 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

It bothers me that recent Linux versions of more have changed their
behaviour so that you have to type magic keystrokes to move to the
next file in a wildcard group, or to get out of it at all.

It?s always been ?:n? for next file, ?:p? for previous file, ?q? to
quit, for both more and less, for as long as I can remember.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 29/01/2026 00:36, rbowman wrote:

On Wed, 28 Jan 2026 14:38:32 -0500, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:

- PDP-8/e "EduSystem" in high-school, starting with
hollerith cards marked with a number 2 pencil,

There was some sort of optical reader? That sounds like even a bigger pain
in the butt than keypunches. I suppose you could erase the pencil marks though. Hard to glue the confetti back in place.

No need to glue. The confetti usually sayed in place for at least a
couple of runs when pressed back into the card....

Dave

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-27, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:

A letter by Don Norman, from the days before he became an Apple
Macintosh enthusiast, and GUIs became a widespread thing.

No idea if he is still an Apple enthusiast, or what he thinks about
Apple so proudly touting that its current flagship OS is officially
?Unix??.

----

[...]

The bad news is that Berkeley Unix is jury-rigged on top of regular
Unix, so it can only patch up the faults: it can't remedy them. Grep

[...]

I haven't yet read the whole of this, but I can't help but think this
text is jury-rigged too.

Some points which would perhaps be fair appear to have been taken to an
extreme needlessly. Sort of reminds me of the kind of comments which led
to this piece being written:

http://web.archive.org/web/20130116213438if_/http://www.brankovukelic.com/2013/01/on-state-of-windows-on-desktop.html


--
Nuno Silva

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-27, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:

Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote this post by blinking in Morse code:

A letter by Don Norman, from the days before he became an Apple
Macintosh enthusiast, and GUIs became a widespread thing.

No idea if he is still an Apple enthusiast, or what he thinks about
Apple so proudly touting that its current flagship OS is officially
?Unix??.

----

The truth about Unix: The user interface is horrid
Donald A. Norman
Department of Psychology and Program in Cognitive Science
Center for Human Information Processing
University of California, San Diego
La Jolla, California 92093

(to appear in Datamation)
Norman, D. A. The truth about UNIX. Datamation 27, 12 (1981).

<snip>

Waaaaah waaaaaah UNIX is tooooooo hard to leeearrrrrrrn.

Even back then it was better than fscking DOS.

If MS-/PC-/...-DOS-style OSes were available at the time this was
written (I didn't check the dates so far - I ain't fully caffeinated yet
for such gymnastics!), I have even more questions.

--
Nuno Silva

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote this post by blinking in Morse code:

On 28 Jan 2026 18:31:45 GMT, Niklas Karlsson wrote:

*nix shells eventually evolved completion, which is at least a
coarse approximation of the abbreviation ability ...

And also applies to other things, like file names.

In fact, command-name expansion only works because it matches an
existing file name.

$ man r <TAB>
$ man radiobutton

That's a Tk built-in command. There's no such file. On my other
box the result is "radeon".

--
Ah, but the choice of dreams to live, there's the rub.
For all dreams are not equal, some exit to nightmare
most end with the dreamer.
But at least one must be lived ... and died.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-29, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

On 2026-01-28, Daniel <me@sc1f1dan.com> wrote:

Not sure what drives the apple cult, to be honest.

And that's what it is, innit? See my .sig.

But but UI consistency is bad! Hardware buttons are bad! You're holding
it wrong!

--
Nuno Silva

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

In article <87y0lheeuj.fsf@atr2.ath.cx>,
jayjwa <jayjwa@atr2.ath.cx.invalid> wrote:

Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

I do find it odd that he was taught to use ?cat? to look at files --
surely the ?more? command was already available at the time, and
provided the screenful-at-a-time display that he clearly felt was
lacking.

And what of "pg"? Everyone is taught "cat" but no one mentions "pg". It
had to have been around back then. My Linux verson is util-linux, but my >Sun/illumos one has a man page dated 1996.

The article people are talking about was published in Datamation
in November, 1981. One can reasonably expect that the article
must have been written before that; perhaps mid 1981.

The `more` command was written by Dan Halbert in 1978, and first
distributed in 3BSD, in late 1979; probably around 18-20 months
before Norman's article was written.

Norman mentions that he is using 4BSD on a VAX, and aludes to
`more`, but doesn't name it explicitly: he describes it having
advantages including, "a richer and more intelligent set of
system programs (including a list program, an intelligent screen
editor, an intelligent set of routines for interacting with
terminals according to their capabilities)". In context, he
used the term "list" to mean "display the contents of a file";
not "list" as in the `ls` command (which is, maybe ironically, a
specialized program to list the contents of directory files), so
we may surmise that here he is referring to `more`, `vi`, and
either `termcap` or `curses`, respectively.

All that said, his criticism is mostly aimed at "Unix" circa 7th
Edition; perhaps unfair in 1981, but not excessively so, since
it would still be extremely common. He seems to refer to this
as "standard" Unix.

Much of the reaction seemed defensive, but Mike Lesk's rebuttal
in a sidebar in the original Datamation appearance is sound
where Norman takes his argument to excess, and well worth a
read: http://www.bitsavers.org/magazines/Datamation/198111.pdf
(Note that Lesk also mentions both `pg` and `more`.)

Some of Norman's criticism was good and remains relevant: lots
of us have suffered greatly due to a misplaced glob character,
and that's something he points out specifically.

I can't help but think that his criticism isn't so much about
Unix the operating system, but more about the shell, programming
libraries, and names of standard commands. But one of the
enduring strengths of Unix was that _all_ of those things could
be changed. Nothing has ever stopped a site from creating an
`/altunix/bin` directory full of differently named programs that
do whatever it is that Norman would want, including a different
shell with different behavior with respect to globbing and so
on. This is in contrast to other systems of the day, where
doing such a thing would have been much harder (often because
commands were built into the command interpreter, which couldn't
be changed, even if it was a separate program).

As for dealing with files with strange characters in their names --
the ?dsw? command he mentioned is not needed any more, and I don?t
think anything like it even exists on current *nix systems.

It probably stood for "delete stupid words", or possibly, the initials

"Delete From Switches": you could use the console switches on
the PDP-7 to toggle in a number; the command would read that
many entries from the directory file you gave it (`.` by
default), and then print out the file name it found at that
offset and issue a prompt. If you responded in the affirmative,
it would generate a core file that, if ran (yes, you could run
core files on PDP-7 Unix) would delete the file. It was a way
to delete files with unprintable/typeable characters in the
filename.

Later, once moved to the PDP-11, it just did the unlink directly
instead of the weird core file business. Once the `rm` command
grew the `-i` option, it was unnecessary and eventually removed.

of the programmer's name. TOPS-10 has DELFIL, which was so kindly
pointed out to me, to delete directories out of [1,1] which are normally
not killable via "del".

Oh, and that weird ?ed? editor is still available as part of the GNU
tools, for those who really want to use it. Thankfully it is far from
the only choice available -- and I?ve certainly never felt the need to
come close enough to touch it with a ten-foot pole.

.sos ed.txt
Creating ED.TXT
00100 /bin/ed is a bit like TOPS-10's "sos" or maybe TOPS-20's "edit"
00200 but ever so slightly less user-friendly. I recall DOS had a
00300 scrolly editor so that you didn't have to use "edline" but
00400 I've since forgotten its name. Maybe it was just "edit". This
00500 was around the time Turbo Pascal and Quick BASIC were out.
00600 $
*e
[DSKB:ED.TXT]

`ed` (pronounced "e-d", or "ee dee", by the way, not as in "Ed")
came from QED on the Berkeley timesharing system (it's amazing
how much stuff came from that system) and has been recreated in
multiple places (e.g., `qedx` on Multics).

Dennis Ritchie went into some of the history of ed here: https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/qed.html

- Dan C.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

In article <yfCdnQ5yNPwyGef0nZ2dnZfqn_udnZ2d@giganews.com>,
Dennis Boone <drb@ihatespam.msu.edu> wrote:

And what of "pg"? Everyone is taught "cat" but no one mentions "pg". It
had to have been around back then. My Linux verson is util-linux, but my Sun/illumos one has a man page dated 1996.

more(1) appeared in west coast unix. It appears that it was written at >Berkeley in 1978.

pg(1) appeared in east coast unix. It is first documented in Research
v8, best I can tell. It's now been removed from the POSIX spec, and at
least some Linux distros have quit building it in the util-linux
package.

My general read of the unix world is that the BSD universe attracted
more mindshare than the Bell universe.

I continue to lament that more people involved in wrecking Linux haven't
read the old Labs unix papers and books.

This is mostly accurate. There was, of course, some
cross-pollination, but BSD filed a lot of rough edges off of
research Unix and quickly became favored outside of the Bell
system. Indeed, 8th Edition Research Unix was based on an
early version of 4BSD (4.1, IIRC).

There was also a legal consideration at play; the 1127 group at
Bell Labs wrote Unix largely for their own consumption and use,
but it was interesting so they published about it at SOSP in
1973, which immediately attracted a lot of attention. It also
found a lot of use within the Bell System, and a non-research
support group was set up for internal customers (the Unix
Support Group would change its identity several times, but
eventually went on to create System III and then System V Unix).

At the time, AT&T (and thus Bell Labs) was operating under the
conditions of a 1956 consent decree that granted them a legal
monopoly over telephone service in the United States. The
conditions of this included that they to use some amount of
revenue to invest in in basic research, that they provide
research results and license patents to anyone for "reasonable
royalties", and that they were also barred from entering the
computer industry.

For Unix, this more or less meant that anyone a copy for a
nominal fee that amounted to the cost of a tape and shipping,
perhaps plus a few bucks for the time of whoever it was who ran
off the tape. It was cheap to get a copy.

However, in 1981, AT&T willingly broke itself up into several
companies: RBOCs ("Regional Bell Operating Companies"; aka, the
local phone company in some geographical region) and AT&T for
long-distance service. AT&T retained Western Electric and Bell
Labs.

This freed AT&T from the conditions of the 1956 consent decree,
which in turn allowed them to enter the computer industry, which
they announced that they intended to do. Unix had exploded in
popularity by then, so they saw it as a strategic asset, and
since it had been born in its own laboritory, they saw their
internal versions (not resarch, but rather, the USG versions)
as "standard". They started to heavily restrict Unix licensing
and charge large fees for System V, but BSD had largely predated
that.

So not only was BSD technically compelling, but it was also much
easier to get: anyone who had a 32/V license could request a
copy, and avoid the System V licensing issues.

Btw, AT&T's big mistake was thinking about computers and Unix
the way they throught about telephone switches: highly vertical,
high margin, higly specialized things. What they failed to see
was that volume mattered far more. There's a story about folks
meeting with AT&T CEO Charlie Brown to talk about Unix and
AT&T's entry into the computer industry; Microsoft was then a
large Unix vendor (with XENIX), and Bill Gates was there.
Apparently at one point he got frustrated and shouted at
everyone else, "you guys don't get it! The only thing that
matters is volume!" Gates was right.

- Dan C.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

In article <20260128161258.000044de@gmail.com>,
John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, 28 Jan 2026 01:52:19 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

The charge that Unix developers' approach to UI/UX matters is
blinkered and informed almost entirely by their own preconceptions,
in particular, is still broadly applicable to UI/UX across the whole
freenix/FOSS ecosystem to this day.

People can, and do, come up with alternatives to those traditional
idiosyncratic Unix commands. Just because you haven?t bothered to try
them out, doesn?t mean they don?t exist.

They sure do - unfortunately, they're usually done by people with the
same essential mindset, who merely happen to have a different set of
personal preconceptions and idiosyncracies.

Please don't feed the troll.

- Dan C.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

In article <FjqeR.3$%sT8.2@fx23.iad>, Scott Lurndal <slp53@pacbell.net> wrote: >cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) writes:

In article <unix-20260128130650@ram.dialup.fu-berlin.de>,
Stefan Ram <ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

Niklas Karlsson <nikke.karlsson@gmail.com> wrote or quoted:

I do find the name of the TYPE command a bit counterintuitive, though. >>>>Not that "more", or worse, "cat" or "less", is any better.

This is probably a textbook case of bikeshedding. For people
who aren't into this stuff, the first thing that clicks for
them are the command names, so that's what they end up talking
about. Doesn't mean it's wrong to talk about command names.

Still, you could say that a name like "rm" instead of "remove"
is quicker to type and helps avoid the mistake of thinking you
can just use the command word like the regular English verb.

And that was the original motivation, of course.

Multics had a concept of an official name for a command, and
then a short version. So to list the contents of the current
working directory, one might run the `list` command:

<snip description of list vs. ls on Multics>

DEC's VMS supported abbreviating commands
to the shortest unique first characters of the command name.

Yeah, that was kind of nifty. TOPS-20/TENEX does it, as well.

Prime had the 'AB' command to create an abbreviation, and
Multics also has aliases. I guess the point is that many
systems have created ways to customize things in this area over
the decades. Nothing new under the sun.

- Dan C.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

In article <mtv30hF575pU1@mid.individual.net>,
Niklas Karlsson <nikke.karlsson@gmail.com> wrote:

On 2026-01-28, Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> wrote:

DEC's VMS supported abbreviating commands
to the shortest unique first characters of the command name.

And appears to have been an inspiration for the Cisco IOS CLI, where you

I think that mainly came from TENEX/TOPS-20; if you look at the
history of Cisco, that sort of makes sense given the folks
involved and their backgrounds. Some XKL Darkstar parts can
(still?) boot TOPS-20.

can do the same thing. Also you'll go "show X" much the same as you
would in VMS to get the status for something.

*nix shells eventually evolved completion, which is at least a coarse >approximation of the abbreviation ability, at least for the part of the >command that is an actual executable... though you can program it to do
more if you put enough effort in.

Completion and abbreviation aren't exactly the same thing, and
completion in the TOPS-20 sense is much more evolved than
anything Unix has done.

It's a shame that the industry collectively is so fixated on
Unix-y systems and spends so little looking at other historical
designs: there are a lot of great lessons to be learned out
there, if folks would just take a look.

- Dan C.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

In article <_fqeR.2$%sT8.0@fx23.iad>, Scott Lurndal <slp53@pacbell.net> wrote: >jayjwa <jayjwa@atr2.ath.cx.invalid> writes:

Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> writes:

Waaaaah waaaaaah UNIX is tooooooo hard to leeearrrrrrrn.

Even back then it was better than fscking DOS.

You're comparing a real, full OS to a home-system toy.

The DEC systems were much more user friendly and the commands were >>consistant. DELETE. COPY. RENAME. APPEND.

.R PIP

User friendly?

Peripheral Interchange Program. That's easy enough, right?
Right?

- Dan C.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

David Wade <g4ugm@dave.invalid> writes:

On 29/01/2026 00:36, rbowman wrote:

On Wed, 28 Jan 2026 14:38:32 -0500, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:

- PDP-8/e "EduSystem" in high-school, starting with
hollerith cards marked with a number 2 pencil,

There was some sort of optical reader? That sounds like even a bigger pain >> in the butt than keypunches. I suppose you could erase the pencil marks
though. Hard to glue the confetti back in place.

No need to glue. The confetti usually sayed in place for at least a
couple of runs when pressed back into the card....

Technical term for that 'confetti' was 'chad'. (See 2000 US election).

We once balanced a box of chad atop a partially opened door
in a colleagues office as a prank.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) writes:

In article <FjqeR.3$%sT8.2@fx23.iad>, Scott Lurndal <slp53@pacbell.net> wrote: >>cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) writes:

In article <unix-20260128130650@ram.dialup.fu-berlin.de>,
Stefan Ram <ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

Niklas Karlsson <nikke.karlsson@gmail.com> wrote or quoted:

I do find the name of the TYPE command a bit counterintuitive, though. >>>>>Not that "more", or worse, "cat" or "less", is any better.

This is probably a textbook case of bikeshedding. For people
who aren't into this stuff, the first thing that clicks for
them are the command names, so that's what they end up talking
about. Doesn't mean it's wrong to talk about command names.

Still, you could say that a name like "rm" instead of "remove"
is quicker to type and helps avoid the mistake of thinking you
can just use the command word like the regular English verb.

And that was the original motivation, of course.

Multics had a concept of an official name for a command, and
then a short version. So to list the contents of the current
working directory, one might run the `list` command:

<snip description of list vs. ls on Multics>

DEC's VMS supported abbreviating commands
to the shortest unique first characters of the command name.

Yeah, that was kind of nifty. TOPS-20/TENEX does it, as well.

One downside is that all VMS commands needed to be registered
with DCL, even user-generated commands. DCL was a VMS
subsystem running in supervisor mode (alongside RMS in
executive mode and the rest of VMS in kernel mode).

Command parsing was handled by the DCL subystem with
rather rigid rules, if I recall correctly, to ensure
consistency across the command language. Unlike Unix
where the command line is simply tokenized and passed
via the argument vector.

However, VMS did provide an interface to get the command
line so an application could parse it directly (lib$get_foreign).


.Page
.Sbttl {*** PMON$MAIN ***} Main Program
.Psect pmon$main,exe,nowrt,byte

.Entry pmon$main,^m<>

;++
; Check to see if executed from batch job
;--
bbc #cli$v_batch,cli$l_cliflag(ap),1$
bisl #<pmon$m_batch!pmon$m_hard>,flags
1$:

;++
; Do Initialization.
;--
calls #0,pmon$initialize
;++
; Get the foreign command line.
;--
pushaq foreign_block
calls #1,lib$get_foreign
;++
; Set up and call TPARSE to parse the input string.
;--
movzwl foreign_block,parse_block+TPA$L_STRINGCNT
movl foreign_block+4,parse_block+TPA$L_STRINGPTR
pushal pmon$key
pushal pmon$state
pushal parse_block
calls #3,lib$tparse
blbs r0,3042$
3022$:
;++
; Handle Control-C traps
;--
$dclast_s astadr=pmon$ctrap,astprm=#3

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Peter Flass <Peter@Iron-Spring.com> writes:

On 1/28/26 16:45, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:

On 28 Jan 2026 15:21:20 GMT, Niklas Karlsson wrote:

Could Multics `print` also concatenate files, which is after all
where the name `cat` comes from?

Some descriptions of early Unix mention that there was also a ?dog?
command in addition to ?cat?. Though what it did was never described,
and nothing remotely resembling that name seems to exist on current
*nix systems.

Presumably it was some kind of file-concatenation utility somewhat
like cat, perhaps with additional features, but who knows ...

Maybe it just barked. Burroughs 5500 MCP has a SPO (console) command EI,
and all it did was reply EIO.

We had that on the B3500 systems as well. We also had the BO (Blackout) command for hardcopy terminals to 'black out' a password.

When you executed that command, it would print 8 'W' and overprint
with 8 'X' and 8 'M' characters.

Executing it on a glass terminal would leave a response of 8 "M'
characters.

The MCP ignored any characters after 'BO'. You could type,
for example:

BOOBS

the response was

MMMMMMMMM

:-)

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Scott Lurndal wrote this post by blinking in Morse code:

David Wade <g4ugm@dave.invalid> writes:

On 29/01/2026 00:36, rbowman wrote:

On Wed, 28 Jan 2026 14:38:32 -0500, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:

- PDP-8/e "EduSystem" in high-school, starting with
hollerith cards marked with a number 2 pencil,

There was some sort of optical reader? That sounds like even a bigger pain >>> in the butt than keypunches. I suppose you could erase the pencil marks
though. Hard to glue the confetti back in place.

No need to glue. The confetti usually sayed in place for at least a
couple of runs when pressed back into the card....

Technical term for that 'confetti' was 'chad'. (See 2000 US election).

We once balanced a box of chad atop a partially opened door
in a colleagues office as a prank.

Some clown put the paper-type chads in the room heater.
Then the algebra teacher turned on the heat :-)

That class was where we were introduced to BASIC. For awhile the
quality of the code was judged solely by how much output it
printed.

After awhile a few of us got the hang of it.

I remember a math teacher talking about the "public library" and I
though it was some type of business arrangement :-D

--
Dreams are free, but you get soaked on the connect time.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-29, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

On 2026-01-28, Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> wrote:

Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote this post by blinking in Morse code:

Oh, and that weird ?ed? editor is still available as part of the GNU
tools, for those who really want to use it. Thankfully it is far from
the only choice available -- and I?ve certainly never felt the need to
come close enough to touch it with a ten-foot pole.

My only connection with ed is that I use :x in vim to save and quit.

Heh. ed's compactness is why I sometimes use it.

Its terseness and compactness back then were probably a very good
feature. Even if there were no visual editors on/for unices back when
this was written (was that the case?), the behaviour of ed seems to be
more particular to wanting to be quite concise than owing to an idea of
"this is how editors should behave in general".

How about TECO? :-)

I had a job writing assembler code for DOS machines for a
classified ad system. The editor of choice was... EDLIN.
Very painful to page to where you wanted to go in a 1Mb file.

I found that edlin was just enough like CP/M's ed to feel familiar,
and just enough different to bite you.

Sounds a bit like the relationship between Nano and Emacs in my
experience :-P

I showed them PC vi, but though faster to use, it took awhile to
load a 1Mb file (obviously building an index into the file), so
was categorically rejected.

My boss (from a different company) cued me onto VEDIT, which was
nicer but had a tendency to reverse all the character in its buffer.
:-D

It did *what*...

My editor of choice in my MS-DOS days was KEDIT.

--
Nuno Silva

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-29, Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Thu, 29 Jan 2026 06:30:38 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

It bothers me that recent Linux versions of more have changed their
behaviour so that you have to type magic keystrokes to move to the
next file in a wildcard group, or to get out of it at all.

It?s always been ?:n? for next file, ?:p? for previous file, ?q? to
quit, for both more and less, for as long as I can remember.

Perhaps, but the version I had (which came standard with whatever
version of Debian I was using at the time) would let you scan
through multiple files with nothing more than the space bar.
When you reached the end of a file, a line would appear at the
bottom of the screen saying so, and the next press of the space
bar would take you into the next file. At the end of the first
(or only) file, it would exit to the command prompt.

I found this a lot more convenient, and would like to have it back.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-29, Dan Cross <cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net> wrote:

In article <_fqeR.2$%sT8.0@fx23.iad>, Scott Lurndal <slp53@pacbell.net> wrote:

jayjwa <jayjwa@atr2.ath.cx.invalid> writes:

Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> writes:

Waaaaah waaaaaah UNIX is tooooooo hard to leeearrrrrrrn.

Even back then it was better than fscking DOS.

You're comparing a real, full OS to a home-system toy.

The DEC systems were much more user friendly and the commands were
consistant. DELETE. COPY. RENAME. APPEND.

.R PIP

User friendly?

Peripheral Interchange Program. That's easy enough, right?
Right?

I always hated the name PIP. "Peripheral Interchange Program"
sounds like some sort of support system for device independence
and/or hardware reconfiguration, not a file copy utility.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-29, Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> wrote:

David Wade <g4ugm@dave.invalid> writes:

On 29/01/2026 00:36, rbowman wrote:

On Wed, 28 Jan 2026 14:38:32 -0500, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:

- PDP-8/e "EduSystem" in high-school, starting with
hollerith cards marked with a number 2 pencil,

There was some sort of optical reader? That sounds like even a bigger pain >>> in the butt than keypunches. I suppose you could erase the pencil marks
though. Hard to glue the confetti back in place.

No need to glue. The confetti usually sayed in place for at least a
couple of runs when pressed back into the card....

Technical term for that 'confetti' was 'chad'. (See 2000 US election).

We once balanced a box of chad atop a partially opened door
in a colleagues office as a prank.

When a cow orker got married we dumped a bunch of chad down the
heater vents in his car. When he sold the car six months later
it was still coming out when he turned on the heater.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-29, Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> wrote:

Peter Flass <Peter@Iron-Spring.com> writes:

Maybe it just barked. Burroughs 5500 MCP has a SPO (console)
command EI, and all it did was reply EIO.

$ make love
Not war?

We had that on the B3500 systems as well. We also had the BO (Blackout) command for hardcopy terminals to 'black out' a password.

When you executed that command, it would print 8 'W' and overprint
with 8 'X' and 8 'M' characters.

MTS on the 2741 terminals would prepare the paper for a password
with overstruck W, M, B, and I. (We discovered this by manually
turning the form advance knob between each line.)

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-29, Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> wrote:

On 2026-01-29, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

On 2026-01-28, Daniel <me@sc1f1dan.com> wrote:

Not sure what drives the apple cult, to be honest.

And that's what it is, innit? See my .sig.

But but UI consistency is bad! Hardware buttons are bad!
You're holding it wrong!

Don't laugh. The other day I was on the phone with our
User from Hell - I was having trouble getting him to
double-click an icon. As far as I can tell, he was
either holding the mouse backwards so the buttons were
reversed, or (less likely) he had stumbled up on the
setting that reverses the buttons.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 1/29/26 07:06, Dan Cross wrote:

I can't help but think that his criticism isn't so much about
Unix the operating system, but more about the shell, programming
libraries, and names of standard commands. But one of the
enduring strengths of Unix was that _all_ of those things could
be changed. Nothing has ever stopped a site from creating an
`/altunix/bin` directory full of differently named programs that
do whatever it is that Norman would want, including a different
shell with different behavior with respect to globbing and so
on.

I can't imagine anything worse. I may not love some of the commands, but renaming or extending would be a complete disaster!

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 1/29/26 12:32, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

On 2026-01-29, Dan Cross <cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net> wrote:

In article <_fqeR.2$%sT8.0@fx23.iad>, Scott Lurndal <slp53@pacbell.net> wrote:

jayjwa <jayjwa@atr2.ath.cx.invalid> writes:

Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> writes:

Waaaaah waaaaaah UNIX is tooooooo hard to leeearrrrrrrn.

Even back then it was better than fscking DOS.

You're comparing a real, full OS to a home-system toy.

The DEC systems were much more user friendly and the commands were
consistant. DELETE. COPY. RENAME. APPEND.

.R PIP

User friendly?

Peripheral Interchange Program. That's easy enough, right?
Right?

I always hated the name PIP. "Peripheral Interchange Program"
sounds like some sort of support system for device independence
and/or hardware reconfiguration, not a file copy utility.

XDS Sigma had PCL (Peripheral C...[something, Command? Control?]
Language, pronounced "Pickle".

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Thu, 29 Jan 2026 19:32:18 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

MTS on the 2741 terminals would prepare the paper for a password
with overstruck W, M, B, and I. (We discovered this by manually
turning the form advance knob between each line.)

So, no full-duplex operation, then? On the DEC terminals, the system
just turned the echo off.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Thu, 29 Jan 2026 19:32:16 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

On 2026-01-29, Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Thu, 29 Jan 2026 06:30:38 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

It bothers me that recent Linux versions of more have changed
their behaviour so that you have to type magic keystrokes to move
to the next file in a wildcard group, or to get out of it at all.

It?s always been ?:n? for next file, ?:p? for previous file, ?q? to
quit, for both more and less, for as long as I can remember.

Perhaps, but the version I had (which came standard with whatever
version of Debian I was using at the time) would let you scan
through multiple files with nothing more than the space bar.

I just checked /usr/bin/more, and it still works that way.

Can?t find an option to have less do the same, but I don?t see that as
a big loss ...

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Wed, 28 Jan 2026 14:07:00 -0500, jayjwa wrote:

Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

I do find it odd that he was taught to use ?cat? to look at files
-- surely the ?more? command was already available at the time, and
provided the screenful-at-a-time display that he clearly felt was
lacking.

And what of "pg"? Everyone is taught "cat" but no one mentions "pg".
It had to have been around back then. My Linux verson is util-linux,
but my Sun/illumos one has a man page dated 1996.

I had a look at the POSIX spec on the definition of the ?more?
command. The section headed ?RATIONALE? starts off:

The _more_ utility, available in BSD and BSD-derived systems, was
chosen as the prototype for the POSIX file display program since
it is more widely available than either the public-domain program
_less_ or than _pg_, a pager provided in System V. The 4.4 BSD
_more_ is the model for the features selected; it is almost fully
upwards-compatible from the 4.3 BSD version in wide use and has
become more amenable for _vi_ users. Several features originally
derived from various file editors, found in both _less_ and _pg_,
have been added to this volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-200x as they
have proved extremely popular with users.

So it seems likely your Sun system acquired ?pg? as part of its
embrace of AT&T System V.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-29, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On Thu, 29 Jan 2026 19:32:16 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

I always hated the name PIP. "Peripheral Interchange Program" sounds
like some sort of support system for device independence and/or hardware
reconfiguration, not a file copy utility.

Pip Installs Packages.

Aha, a recursive acronym!

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Thu, 29 Jan 2026 19:32:16 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

I always hated the name PIP. "Peripheral Interchange Program" sounds
like some sort of support system for device independence and/or
hardware reconfiguration, not a file copy utility.

If it was called something like ?Peripheral Manager Program? or
?Peripheral Configuration Program?, I would agree you had a point. But
I think the word ?Interchange? is a hint that there?s something
involving actual I/O going on.

(No, the concept of ?interchange? of peripherals themselves is not
something that would have made sense back then.)

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-28, John Levine wrote:

According to Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us>:

The truth about Unix: The user interface is horrid
Donald A. Norman

Waaaaah waaaaaah UNIX is tooooooo hard to leeearrrrrrrn.

Mike Lesk wrote a rather testy reply in which he pointed out that
the "more natural" commands Norman preferred were the ones on the
PDP-10 he was accustomed to.

If this is true, that's a huge bias which really should be accounted for
when discussing user interface design, instead of letting it influence
the criticism. A bit amateurish, I'd say?

In general I do get a bit wary if the expressions "user friendly" and "intuitive" are used without clear objectiveness, and this kind of
"preference" I'd put in the same drawer as "intuitive".

--
Nuno Silva

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Subject: less is *not* really more or less like more? (was: Re: Don Norman: The Truth About Unix)

On 2026-01-29, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:

On Thu, 29 Jan 2026 19:32:16 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

On 2026-01-29, Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Thu, 29 Jan 2026 06:30:38 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

It bothers me that recent Linux versions of more have changed
their behaviour so that you have to type magic keystrokes to move
to the next file in a wildcard group, or to get out of it at all.

It?s always been ?:n? for next file, ?:p? for previous file, ?q? to
quit, for both more and less, for as long as I can remember.

Perhaps, but the version I had (which came standard with whatever
version of Debian I was using at the time) would let you scan
through multiple files with nothing more than the space bar.

I just checked /usr/bin/more, and it still works that way.

Could it be that in Charlie's system the distro somehow found it fitting
to alias more to less?

Or is it somehow using a different implementation of the same utility
now?

Can?t find an option to have less do the same, but I don?t see that as
a big loss ...

Well, it's one reason why there's no urgency in replacing more with
less, as they're visibly not compatible. Or to have care if what's going
on is replacing one more with another more.

--
Nuno Silva

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-29, rbowman wrote:

On Thu, 29 Jan 2026 19:32:19 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

Don't laugh. The other day I was on the phone with our User from Hell -
I was having trouble getting him to double-click an icon. As far as I
can tell, he was either holding the mouse backwards so the buttons were
reversed, or (less likely) he had stumbled up on the setting that
reverses the buttons.

I'm left handed so the first thing I do is reverse the buttons. It's interesting watching someone try to use it. I sometimes forget that before logging into a Linux session the buttons are not reversed.

I do a mental switch too. I 'right click' to bring up menus although it's really a 'left click'.

I wonder, if this button swapping is common among left-handed users,
whether other naming schemes were considered for the operations. I don't
know, "Main click" and "Context click", did anything like that ever get
used or proposed?

--
Nuno Silva

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-28, jayjwa wrote:

Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

I do find it odd that he was taught to use ?cat? to look at files --
surely the ?more? command was already available at the time, and
provided the screenful-at-a-time display that he clearly felt was
lacking.

And what of "pg"? Everyone is taught "cat" but no one mentions "pg". It
had to have been around back then. My Linux verson is util-linux, but my Sun/illumos one has a man page dated 1996.

I could find a timestamp of 1978-06-13, so I guess it goes at least that
far:

https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=AUSAM/source/S/pg.c

[...]

Oh, and that weird ?ed? editor is still available as part of the GNU
tools, for those who really want to use it. Thankfully it is far from
the only choice available -- and I?ve certainly never felt the need to
come close enough to touch it with a ten-foot pole.

Yeah, and not only GNU. E.g. busybox will have one too, and it's bound
to have more implementations, given it's specified in IEEE 1003.1.

.sos ed.txt
Creating ED.TXT
00100 /bin/ed is a bit like TOPS-10's "sos" or maybe TOPS-20's "edit"
00200 but ever so slightly less user-friendly. I recall DOS had a
00300 scrolly editor so that you didn't have to use "edline" but
00400 I've since forgotten its name. Maybe it was just "edit". This
00500 was around the time Turbo Pascal and Quick BASIC were out.
00600 $
*e
[DSKB:ED.TXT]

I think the only visual editor I've used in MS-DOS was EDIT.COM. Came
with it, but my experience was mostly with later versions of MS-DOS,
mainly "6.22" as bundled with Windows 4.10.1998, so it's possible things
were vastly different in earlier versions.

--
Nuno Silva

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

In article <10lgd7a$1ic7b$1@dont-email.me>,
Peter Flass <Peter@Iron-Spring.com> wrote:

On 1/29/26 07:06, Dan Cross wrote:

I can't help but think that his criticism isn't so much about
Unix the operating system, but more about the shell, programming
libraries, and names of standard commands. But one of the
enduring strengths of Unix was that _all_ of those things could
be changed. Nothing has ever stopped a site from creating an
`/altunix/bin` directory full of differently named programs that
do whatever it is that Norman would want, including a different
shell with different behavior with respect to globbing and so
on.

I can't imagine anything worse. I may not love some of the commands, but >renaming or extending would be a complete disaster!

That's the beauty of it, though: you don't _have_ to use it.

One of the relative strengths of Unix was that it was trivial to
install a new program: you just copied it into some directory
that was in your $PATH. And a shell was just aother program.
So if you _wanted_ to live in an alternative universe of
commands and interpreters, you could by simply adding the
directory where they lived earlier in your $PATH, but you did't
have to, nor did you have to change anything about the base
system to do it.

- Dan C.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.6
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 1/29/26 16:48, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:

On Thu, 29 Jan 2026 19:32:16 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

I always hated the name PIP. "Peripheral Interchange Program" sounds
like some sort of support system for device independence and/or
hardware reconfiguration, not a file copy utility.

If it was called something like ?Peripheral Manager Program? or
?Peripheral Configuration Program?, I would agree you had a point. But
I think the word ?Interchange? is a hint that there?s something
involving actual I/O going on.

(No, the concept of ?interchange? of peripherals themselves is not
something that would have made sense back then.)

Interchange of data. Copy Paper Tape to DECTape or something,like that?

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 1/30/26 04:01, Dan Cross wrote:

that was in your $PATH. And a shell was just aother program.
So if you _wanted_ to live in an alternative universe of
commands and interpreters, you could by simply adding the
directory where they lived earlier in your $PATH, but you did't
have to, nor did you have to change anything about the base
system to do it.

The shell is a very powerful feature, which unix borrowed from Multics
and extended. Previous to this the command interpreter (like
command.com) was part of the OS and couldn't be changed much. To run a program, you had to type "run <program>" and programs couldn't easily be connected.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Peter Flass <Peter@Iron-Spring.com> writes:

On 1/30/26 04:01, Dan Cross wrote:

that was in your $PATH. And a shell was just aother program.
So if you _wanted_ to live in an alternative universe of
commands and interpreters, you could by simply adding the
directory where they lived earlier in your $PATH, but you did't
have to, nor did you have to change anything about the base
system to do it.

The shell is a very powerful feature, which unix borrowed from Multics
and extended. Previous to this the command interpreter (like
command.com) was part of the OS and couldn't be changed much. To run a >program, you had to type "run <program>" and programs couldn't easily be >connected.

To be fair, real operating systems (the set of which doesn't include
either Windows or MS-DOS), had mechanisms to add custom commands
to the command interpreter. DCL on VMS, for example, allowed
user-defined commands.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

antispam@fricas.org (Waldek Hebisch) writes:

Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:

On 2026-01-28, Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> wrote:

jayjwa <jayjwa@atr2.ath.cx.invalid> writes:

Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

I do find it odd that he was taught to use ?cat? to look at files -- >>>>> surely the ?more? command was already available at the time, and
provided the screenful-at-a-time display that he clearly felt was
lacking.

And what of "pg"? Everyone is taught "cat" but no one mentions "pg". It >>>> had to have been around back then. My Linux verson is util-linux, but my >>>> Sun/illumos one has a man page dated 1996.

The pg(1) utility appears to have first been included in Unix V10 (1989) >>> and was included in SVR4 and successor USL distributions (e.g. unixware). >>

Oh yeah, pg. I forgot about that one. It's been a long time.

It bothers me that recent Linux versions of more have changed their
behaviour so that you have to type magic keystrokes to move to the
next file in a wildcard group, or to get out of it at all.

Actually I had the opposite problem: a program starts 'more' in
a terminal window to show content of a file. Now, when the file
fits into a single screen 'more' immediately quits and the
termianal window vanishes. That works with 'less', but recent
Linux distributions seem to skip 'less', so only 'more' may
be available.

Are you sure about that last statement? My experience has
been the opposite, where the distros (Fedora, Ubuntu) seem
to prefer 'less' over 'more' (no pun intended).

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Peter Flass wrote this post by blinking in Morse code:

On 1/29/26 16:48, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:

On Thu, 29 Jan 2026 19:32:16 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

I always hated the name PIP. "Peripheral Interchange Program" sounds
like some sort of support system for device independence and/or
hardware reconfiguration, not a file copy utility.

If it was called something like ?Peripheral Manager Program? or
?Peripheral Configuration Program?, I would agree you had a point. But
I think the word ?Interchange? is a hint that there?s something
involving actual I/O going on.

(No, the concept of ?interchange? of peripherals themselves is not
something that would have made sense back then.)

Interchange of data. Copy Paper Tape to DECTape or something,like that?

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Interchange_Program>

--
Fog Lamps, n.:
Excessively (often obnoxiously) bright lamps mounted on the fronts
of automobiles; used on dry, clear nights to indicate that the
driver's brain is in a fog. See also "Idiot Lights".

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Thu, 29 Jan 2026 06:30:38 GMT
Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:

On 2026-01-28, Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> wrote:

Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote this post by blinking in Morse code:

Oh, and that weird ?ed? editor is still available as part of the GNU
tools, for those who really want to use it. Thankfully it is far from
the only choice available -- and I?ve certainly never felt the need to
come close enough to touch it with a ten-foot pole.

My only connection with ed is that I use :x in vim to save and quit.

How about TECO? :-)

I had a job writing assembler code for DOS machines for a
classified ad system. The editor of choice was... EDLIN.
Very painful to page to where you wanted to go in a 1Mb file.

I found that edlin was just enough like CP/M's ed to feel familiar,
and just enough different to bite you.

I showed them PC vi, but though faster to use, it took awhile to
load a 1Mb file (obviously building an index into the file), so
was categorically rejected.

My boss (from a different company) cued me onto VEDIT, which was
nicer but had a tendency to reverse all the character in its buffer.
:-D

My editor of choice in my MS-DOS days was KEDIT.

It was more Jeff Gribbin's (John's brother) choice, but I used it and
wrote a heap of macros (all lost now) in "ked" to customise the CMS type
XEDIT port to more of a DOS 'Edit' thing, with a few extras like
box-drawing (that used 8? out of the 10 flags available).

I still resort to it occasionally for the "column delete" that just isn't
there in a lot of modern WP type programs.
--
Bah, and indeed Humbug.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

If it was called something like ?Peripheral Manager Program? or
?Peripheral Configuration Program?, I would agree you had a point. But
I think the word ?Interchange? is a hint that there?s something
involving actual I/O going on.

(No, the concept of ?interchange? of peripherals themselves is not
something that would have made sense back then.)

It moves data around. Many of the things it does can be done using the
TYPE, COPY, DIR commands.

.r pip

*TTY:=DSK:ASM.MAC
title example 2
search monsym
i: 1
start: pbin%
add 1,i
pbout%
haltf%
end start

*TTY:=DSK: /L

FIRST TXT 01 <057> 20-Dec-98 DSKB: [30,1]
HELLO BCP 01 <057> 29-Dec-98
HELLO REL 01 <057> 29-Dec-98
HELLO EXE 16 <057> 29-Dec-98
SWITCH INI 01 <057> 29-Dec-98
DAY CTL 01 <057> 01-Jan-99
ASM MAC 01 <057> 20-Jan-99

Total Blocks 22
*^Z

Here's a few of its switches:
...
D Delete File
(DX) Copy All But Specified Files
E Treat (Card) Columns 73-80 as Spaces
F List Disk or DTA Directory (File Names and Ext. only)
G Ignore I/O Errors
H Image Binary Processing (Mode)
I Image Processing (Mode)
J Punch Cards in ASCII Mode (Output Device must be CDP:)
or Convert Control Characters on TTY output.
L List Directory
M See MTA Switches Below
N Delete Sequence Numbers
O Same as /S Switch, except Increment is by 1
P FORTRAN output assumed. Convert format
control characters for LPT listing
/B/P copy FORTRAN Binary
Q Print (this) List of Switches and Meanings
R Rename File
S Resequence, or Add Sequence Numbers to File;
Increment is by 10
T Suppress Trailing Spaces only
U Copy Block 0 (DTA)
...

It's documented in AA-0998B-TB "User's Utilities Manual". Did I see one
on CP/M? Yes, I think so. But I never used CP/M much.

--
PGP Key ID: 781C A3E2 C6ED 70A6 B356 7AF5 B510 542E D460 5CAE
"The Internet should always be the Wild West!"

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Subject: Re: less is *not* really more or less like more? (was: Re: Don Norman: The Truth About Unix)

On 2026-01-30, Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> wrote:

Could it be that in Charlie's system the distro somehow found it fitting
to alias more to less?

Nope. They're two separate binaries:

$ which more
/usr/bin/more
$ which less
/usr/bin/less
$ ls -li /usr/bin/more /usr/bin/less
1050498 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 198960 May 2 2024 /usr/bin/less
1046622 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 59712 Nov 21 2024 /usr/bin/more

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-30, Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> wrote:

On 2026-01-28, John Levine wrote:

According to Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us>:

The truth about Unix: The user interface is horrid
Donald A. Norman

Waaaaah waaaaaah UNIX is tooooooo hard to leeearrrrrrrn.

Mike Lesk wrote a rather testy reply in which he pointed out that
the "more natural" commands Norman preferred were the ones on the
PDP-10 he was accustomed to.

If this is true, that's a huge bias which really should be accounted for
when discussing user interface design, instead of letting it influence
the criticism. A bit amateurish, I'd say?

In general I do get a bit wary if the expressions "user friendly" and "intuitive" are used without clear objectiveness, and this kind of "preference" I'd put in the same drawer as "intuitive".

I think I heard of a study some time ago that showed that the actual
command words were not as important as people think. For instance,
you have to learn something to delete a file - but it could be "delete",
"del", "remove", "rm", "kill", "scratch", etc. Which one makes more
sense? And if you chose the wrong one of several equally intuitive
words, it won't work any better than if you tried a non-intuitive word.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-30, Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> wrote:

Peter Flass wrote this post by blinking in Morse code:

On 1/29/26 16:48, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:

On Thu, 29 Jan 2026 19:32:16 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

I always hated the name PIP. "Peripheral Interchange Program" sounds
like some sort of support system for device independence and/or
hardware reconfiguration, not a file copy utility.

If it was called something like ?Peripheral Manager Program? or
?Peripheral Configuration Program?, I would agree you had a point.
But I think the word ?Interchange? is a hint that there?s something
involving actual I/O going on.

If the word "Interchange" hadn't been immediately preceded by
"Peripheral" I might agree with you. However, "Peripheral Interchange" suggests to me that it is the peripherals that are being interchanged,
not data.

(No, the concept of ?interchange? of peripherals themselves is not
something that would have made sense back then.)

It could have. I had written device independence into some of my own
programs at about that time. And this was on mainframes, where the
concept of device independence was, for the most part, still a long
way off.

Interchange of data. Copy Paper Tape to DECTape or something,like that?

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Interchange_Program>

Fog Lamps, n.:
Excessively (often obnoxiously) bright lamps mounted on the fronts
of automobiles; used on dry, clear nights to indicate that the
driver's brain is in a fog. See also "Idiot Lights".

Sadly, this statement is now out of date. Many standard headlights
are now excessively, obnoxiously, and dangerously bright. It started
in the late '80s with the new concept of daytime running lights being implemented on the high beam lamps, and has evolved into (sometimes deliberately) misadjusted HID and LED lamps. And automobile ads
glorify it.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 1/30/26 10:32, Kerr-Mudd, John wrote:

On Thu, 29 Jan 2026 06:30:38 GMT
Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:

My editor of choice in my MS-DOS days was KEDIT.

It was more Jeff Gribbin's (John's brother) choice, but I used it and
wrote a heap of macros (all lost now) in "ked" to customise the CMS type XEDIT port to more of a DOS 'Edit' thing, with a few extras like
box-drawing (that used 8? out of the 10 flags available).

I still resort to it occasionally for the "column delete" that just isn't there in a lot of modern WP type programs.

Geany has it. That's one of the reasons I chose it. I use it all the time.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Fri, 30 Jan 2026 19:18:32 GMT
Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:

Fog Lamps, n.:
Excessively (often obnoxiously) bright lamps mounted on the
fronts of automobiles; used on dry, clear nights to indicate
that the driver's brain is in a fog. See also "Idiot
Lights".

Sadly, this statement is now out of date. Many standard headlights
are now excessively, obnoxiously, and dangerously bright. It started
in the late '80s with the new concept of daytime running lights being implemented on the high beam lamps, and has evolved into (sometimes deliberately) misadjusted HID and LED lamps. And automobile ads
glorify it.

Nothing like trying to watch the guide lines on a twisty mountain road
at night while getting stabbed in the eye by oncoming vehicles :/ There
really oughta be a law; I have to wonder how many people have been
killed by this, over the years...


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

rbowman <bowman@montana.com> writes:

On Fri, 30 Jan 2026 15:50:45 GMT, Scott Lurndal wrote:

Are you sure about that last statement? My experience has been the
opposite, where the distros (Fedora, Ubuntu) seem to prefer 'less' over
'more' (no pun intended).

$ more --version
more from util-linux 2.41

$ less --version
less 668 (GNU regular expressions)
Copyright (C) 1984-2024 Mark Nudelman

less comes with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
For information about the terms of redistribution,
see the file named README in the less distribution.
Home page: https://greenwoodsoftware.com/less

That's Ubunto 25.10. Fedora 43 is the same.

All uti-linux packages are not the same. Neither Ubuntu or Fedora has the >legacy 'pg' but Arch does.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Util-linux

From the Ubuntu man more

DESCRIPTION
more is a filter for paging through text one screenful at a time. This >version is especially primitive. Users should realize that less(1)
provides more(1) emulation plus extensive enhancements.

Indeed. less(1) will honor the environment variable LESS_IS_MORE
to match POSIX semantics.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Thu, 29 Jan 2026 12:15:03 +0000
Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> wrote:

Not sure what drives the apple cult, to be honest.

And that's what it is, innit? See my .sig.

But but UI consistency is bad! Hardware buttons are bad! You're
holding it wrong!

It's bleakly funny considering that Apple actually took UI consistency, ergonomics, and natural user habits seriously back in Ye Olden Days,
when the whole idea of a GUI was new to almost everyone who wasn't a
PARC alum and they wanted to prevent the Mac software ecosystem from
ending up with a thousand developers all haphazardly re-inventing its conventions by blind imitation - the developer's reference guide starts
off talking about UI conventions before it even gets down to technical information! Sadly, that attitude didn't persist once they'd metamorph-
osized from a manufacturer of personal computers into a vendor of
glitzy consumer gadgets :/


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Thu, 29 Jan 2026 14:50:23 -0000 (UTC)
cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) wrote:

Completion and abbreviation aren't exactly the same thing, and
completion in the TOPS-20 sense is much more evolved than anything
Unix has done.

Powershell in WinNT has a fairly capable completion system. Sadly, PS
is so sesquipedalian that it practically *requires* one.

It's a shame that the industry collectively is so fixated on Unix-y
systems and spends so little looking at other historical designs:
there are a lot of great lessons to be learned out there, if folks
would just take a look.

Yeah, that's long been a pet peeve of mine. Unix had some great ideas,
of course, but there've been other interesting concepts in systems
before and since that were mostly left by the wayside.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 30 Jan 2026 19:02:38 GMT
rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

I don't know how many left handed people use the mouse left handed.
For me I have better fine control. However I play guitars, banjos,
flutes and shoot long guns in the normal right handed manner so it's
all what you learn.

fwiw, if I'm at a computer with a right handed mouse I use it right
handed. It's a little awkward but the buttons work out naturally.

Interestingly, our receptionist at $EMPLOYER is right-handed but uses
the mouse with her left, because her mother was a southpaw and that's
just how she learned to do it. Turns out it's a convenient arrangement
for someone who does a lotta ten-key stuff.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Fri, 30 Jan 2026 15:48:42 GMT
scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) wrote:

The shell is a very powerful feature, which unix borrowed from
Multics and extended. Previous to this the command interpreter
(like command.com) was part of the OS and couldn't be changed much.
To run a program, you had to type "run <program>" and programs
couldn't easily be connected.

To be fair, real operating systems (the set of which doesn't include
either Windows or MS-DOS), had mechanisms to add custom commands to
the command interpreter. DCL on VMS, for example, allowed user-
defined commands.

True, though the particulars varied by system; DCL was certainly one of
the more capable examples.

(I am curious, was Multics truly the first system to make user programs first-class citizens of the command shell? It's such a natural way to
do things from a retrospective point of view that it seems hard to
imagine *nobody* else coming up with it 'til over a decade into the
history of interactive computing...)


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:28:49 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

They sure do - unfortunately, they're usually done by people with
the same essential mindset, who merely happen to have a different
set of personal preconceptions and idiosyncracies.

Feel free to show us how you would do better.

If and when I ever write something with general-purpose utility for
persons besides myself, sure, will do! Meantime, I'll simply note
observable patterns for the record as it's germane to the discussion.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Fri, 30 Jan 2026 13:57:29 -0500, jayjwa wrote:

It's documented in AA-0998B-TB "User's Utilities Manual". Did I see
one on CP/M? Yes, I think so. But I never used CP/M much.

Yes, Gary Kildall did indeed copy the ?PIP? name for the CP/M utility
from the DEC systems he was being influenced by at the time. Along
with the basic string-buffer command line.

Microsoft?s MS-DOS (possibly the QDOS it came from) replaced this with
COPY, RENAME etc. And then MS-DOS 2.0 tried to add some Unix-style functionality, tacked on top of the same old DEC-style string-buffer
command line ... starting a tradition which continues to this day, of
copying Unix-style features into DOS/Windows, and doing it badly.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Fri, 30 Jan 2026 15:14:15 -0000 (UTC), Waldek Hebisch wrote:

Actually I had the opposite problem: a program starts 'more' in a
terminal window to show content of a file. Now, when the file fits
into a single screen 'more' immediately quits and the termianal
window vanishes.

Most command-line programs that can generate lots of output let you
choose what pager command to execute.

That works with 'less', but recent Linux distributions seem to skip
'less', so only 'more' may be available.

ldo@theon:~> dpkg-query -S $(type -p less)
less: /usr/bin/less

It?s a separate package you have to install. Thought it might have
been automatically pulled in for some users, depending on what else
they asked for:

ldo@theon:~> apt-cache rdepends less
[about 4 dozen lines of output omitted, including, interestingly, git]

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Fri, 30 Jan 2026 07:44:21 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

The shell is a very powerful feature, which unix borrowed from
Multics and extended.

Not sure if the shell ran as a separate process under Multics, though.
Multics still subscribed to the traditional idea of the user doing
just about everything within a single process context.

The Unix innovation of creating a separate process to run every
program was revolutionary because many saw it as wasteful and
inefficient, even if it did offer much greater flexibility.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Fri, 30 Jan 2026 17:32:12 +0000, Kerr-Mudd, John wrote:

I still resort to it occasionally for the "column delete" that just isn't there in a lot of modern WP type programs.

Emacs can do that.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Fri, 30 Jan 2026 13:07:14 -0800, John Ames wrote:

On Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:28:49 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

They sure do - unfortunately, they're usually done by people with
the same essential mindset, who merely happen to have a different
set of personal preconceptions and idiosyncracies.

Feel free to show us how you would do better.

If and when I ever write something with general-purpose utility for
persons besides myself, sure, will do! Meantime, I'll simply note
observable patterns for the record as it's germane to the
discussion.

But all you?ve done so far is complain that others are not doing
things the way you want, rather than describing what it is, exactly,
that would be the way you want.

By all means, provide some details that are actually ?germane to the discussion?.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-30, John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, 30 Jan 2026 19:18:32 GMT
Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:

Fog Lamps, n.:
Excessively (often obnoxiously) bright lamps mounted on the
fronts of automobiles; used on dry, clear nights to indicate
that the driver's brain is in a fog. See also "Idiot
Lights".

Sadly, this statement is now out of date. Many standard headlights
are now excessively, obnoxiously, and dangerously bright. It started
in the late '80s with the new concept of daytime running lights being
implemented on the high beam lamps, and has evolved into (sometimes
deliberately) misadjusted HID and LED lamps. And automobile ads
glorify it.

Nothing like trying to watch the guide lines on a twisty mountain road
at night while getting stabbed in the eye by oncoming vehicles :/ There really oughta be a law; I have to wonder how many people have been
killed by this, over the years...

That's assuming that there still are guide lines. Lately I've noticed
that a lot of these lines - along with centre lines - have worn to the
point of being very hard to see. But you're right, those guide lines
on the edge of the road are lifesavers.

Lately I've taken to lowering my sun visor to the point where it cuts
off the light from oncoming cars. If I do it right I can still see
the bumper of the car ahead; I can actually see more that way since
I don't have the oncoming beams interfering with my vision.

As for bright headlights behind me, I adjust my side mirrors to
reflect the light back at the following car. There's a poetic
justice to frying his eyes with his own headlights - and it
discourages tailgating.

Back in the old days, we had inspection stations run by
the provincial government. They checked things like tires,
suspension, brakes, exhaust system - and headlights. It was
taken for granted that you'd flunk the headlight test, and
there was a service station conveniently located near each
inspection station; they had the same headlight adjustment
tools that the inspection station had, and could correct
your lights quickly and cheaply. These inspection stations
were closed, ostensibly for cost-saving reasons, in 1983.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/45379817@N08/10696057996

No equivalent program was ever instituted, although an
emissions inspection program called "AirCare" was set up
in 1992. Its stations only checked vehicle emissions;
general mechanical condition (including headlights)
was not covered. This program was dismantled in 2014.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirCare

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

According to rbowman <bowman@montana.com>:

Pip Installs Packages.

Aha, a recursive acronym!

That's the legend but I'm not sure I buy it.

Back when I was using a PDP-6, it was definitely Peripheral Interchange Program.

The fact that the PDP-6/10 didn't have anything called packages and PIP
didn't install them should be a hint, too.


--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

jayjwa <jayjwa@atr2.ath.cx.invalid> writes:

On the topic of PIP.

It moves data around. Many of the things it does can be done using the
TYPE, COPY, DIR commands.

On many DEC operating systems, those commands are syntactic sugar, invoking PIP under the covers...

--
Rich Alderson news@alderson.users.panix.com
Audendum est, et veritas investiganda; quam etiamsi non assequamur,
omnino tamen proprius, quam nunc sumus, ad eam perveniemus.
--Galen

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Wed, 28 Jan 2026 15:55:17 GMT
scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) wrote:

cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) writes:

In article <unix-20260128130650@ram.dialup.fu-berlin.de>,
Stefan Ram <ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

Niklas Karlsson <nikke.karlsson@gmail.com> wrote or quoted:

I do find the name of the TYPE command a bit counterintuitive, though. >>>Not that "more", or worse, "cat" or "less", is any better.

This is probably a textbook case of bikeshedding. For people
who aren't into this stuff, the first thing that clicks for
them are the command names, so that's what they end up talking
about. Doesn't mean it's wrong to talk about command names.

Still, you could say that a name like "rm" instead of "remove"
is quicker to type and helps avoid the mistake of thinking you
can just use the command word like the regular English verb.

And that was the original motivation, of course.

Multics had a concept of an official name for a command, and
then a short version. So to list the contents of the current
working directory, one might run the `list` command:

<snip description of list vs. ls on Multics>

DEC's VMS supported abbreviating commands
to the shortest unique first characters of the command name.

E
Enter Build
D
Get Cryst
Attac Pirat
Open Oyste
--
Bah, and indeed Humbug.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-29, Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:

My only connection with ed is that I use :x in vim to save and quit.

I know about :x and ZZ, but :wq is so deep-seated in my muscle memory
that I'll probably never change that habit.

Niklas
--
I defy anyone to find a mountain whereupon the dew is this particular
colour, and then return to tell me about it. And no fair wearing
rad-suits for the journey.
-- Carl Jacobs

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-29, Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> wrote:

On 2026-01-29, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

On 2026-01-28, Daniel <me@sc1f1dan.com> wrote:

Not sure what drives the apple cult, to be honest.

And that's what it is, innit? See my .sig.

But but UI consistency is bad! Hardware buttons are bad! You're holding
it wrong!

I've used Macs at a couple of workplaces and the experience wasn't bad.
But I'm a sysadmin; I don't really need all that much more than an SSH
client and a web browser. Maybe an office suite at times, but that is
largely the same experience on any of the common modern OSes. I could
probably mostly do my job on a Chromebook, even if it would hardly be
ideal.

I wouldn't buy a Mac with my own money. Certainly not brand new, at
least.

Niklas
--
Onebarff Gungpure is indeed a fearsome name to be conjured with.
-- Sn!pe in asr

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-29, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

I'm left handed so the first thing I do is reverse the buttons. It's interesting watching someone try to use it. I sometimes forget that before logging into a Linux session the buttons are not reversed.

I'm nominally left-handed but really more like mixed-handed. On the rare occasion that I still write anything by hand (even traditional
signatures are becoming uncommon), I do so with my left, but there are
other things where I prefer my right. Left seems to be somewhat better
at precision and right for brute force, but the difference is pretty
marginal.

As for computer mice, I can use them about equally well with either
hand. For a long time I had it on my left at home and at right at work,
and that didn't cause me any difficulty. When I use a mouse left-handed,
I don't bother to reverse the buttons.

Niklas
--
Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.
-- Mary Ellen Kelly

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Charlie Gibbs wrote this post by blinking in Morse code:

On 2026-01-30, Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> wrote:

<snip>

Fog Lamps, n.:
Excessively (often obnoxiously) bright lamps mounted on the fronts
of automobiles; used on dry, clear nights to indicate that the
driver's brain is in a fog. See also "Idiot Lights".

Sadly, this statement is now out of date. Many standard headlights
are now excessively, obnoxiously, and dangerously bright. It started
in the late '80s with the new concept of daytime running lights being implemented on the high beam lamps, and has evolved into (sometimes deliberately) misadjusted HID and LED lamps. And automobile ads
glorify it.

One time I got pulled over and forced to do various maneuvers on
my artificial hips to prove I was not "impaired".

Why?

I left a brightly lit parking lot with only my running lights on,
and they were quite enough for me to see while driving at night.
Then I was so flustered I pulled out a credit card instead of my
license. :-D

At least I didn't get pistol-whipped.

You've certainly seen those LED vehicle lights in various shapes
(e.g. "H" on Hyundais), and blinkers that scroll (throbbers on a
car?)

--
Don't let go of what you've got hold of, until you have hold of
something else.
-- First Rule of Wing Walking

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-29, Dan Cross <cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net> wrote:

Completion and abbreviation aren't exactly the same thing, and
completion in the TOPS-20 sense is much more evolved than
anything Unix has done.

No indeed, they aren't the same thing. I was only trying to say that
it's the closest you'll typically get on a *nix system.

I suppose one could write a shell that does support abbreviation. I
don't know of any such attempts (but would be very interested if they
did exist), and I could see it getting messy the way things work on
*nix.

Niklas
--
"Avoid hyperbole at all costs, its the most destructive argument on
the planet" - Mark McIntyre in comp.lang.c

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 1/30/26 14:18, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:

On Fri, 30 Jan 2026 07:44:21 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

The shell is a very powerful feature, which unix borrowed from
Multics and extended.

Not sure if the shell ran as a separate process under Multics, though. Multics still subscribed to the traditional idea of the user doing
just about everything within a single process context.

The Unix innovation of creating a separate process to run every
program was revolutionary because many saw it as wasteful and
inefficient, even if it did offer much greater flexibility.

I was waiting for a reply from someone who knows more about Multics than
I do. Seeing none, I'll say I believe a user runs everything in a single process. Late in life I think there were some moves toward multiple threads/processes.

When I first read about the unix model, it was also my reaction that it
was extremely wasteful of resources. Obviously having the system track multiple processes and address spaces had to add to overhead. Now
systems are powerful enough that no one cares.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

In article <20260130130439.0000298b@gmail.com>,
John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, 29 Jan 2026 14:50:23 -0000 (UTC)
cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) wrote:

Completion and abbreviation aren't exactly the same thing, and
completion in the TOPS-20 sense is much more evolved than anything
Unix has done.

Powershell in WinNT has a fairly capable completion system. Sadly, PS
is so sesquipedalian that it practically *requires* one.

(Fantastic use of vocabulary.)

It's a shame that the industry collectively is so fixated on Unix-y
systems and spends so little looking at other historical designs:
there are a lot of great lessons to be learned out there, if folks
would just take a look.

Yeah, that's long been a pet peeve of mine. Unix had some great ideas,
of course, but there've been other interesting concepts in systems
before and since that were mostly left by the wayside.

Indeed. It's a shame; how many hidden gems are sitting there,
buried in the evolutionary graveyard of systems that were just
before their time?

- Dan C.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

In article <mu695kFan7cU4@mid.individual.net>,
Niklas Karlsson <nikke.karlsson@gmail.com> wrote:

On 2026-01-29, Dan Cross <cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net> wrote:

Completion and abbreviation aren't exactly the same thing, and
completion in the TOPS-20 sense is much more evolved than
anything Unix has done.

No indeed, they aren't the same thing. I was only trying to say that
it's the closest you'll typically get on a *nix system.

I suppose one could write a shell that does support abbreviation. I
don't know of any such attempts (but would be very interested if they
did exist), and I could see it getting messy the way things work on
*nix.

Abbreviations in the sense I understood them earlier in the
thread were closer to shell aliases than what I gather you mean
here, which is closer to the DEC (and IBM VM) thing of requiring
the user to only type a few characters.

One could write a shell that mimmicked the latter behavior, as
you observed; it would simply walk $PATH, open directories, and
keep look for programs that matched a prefix until it found
something unambiguous.

That's not quite how e.g. the VMS mechanism worked. On VMS,
you could define "foreign commands" and specify how much of the
prefix you considered significant; that overrode the need for
non-ambiguity in the first four characters of the verb prefix.
For instance, I have `bl*ank:==type/page nl:` to provide a quick
way to clear the screen in my `LOGIN.COM` file. (I'm sure that
Rich already knows, but the name is an homage to TOPS-20.)

- Dan C.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

In article <20260130125528.00002c55@gmail.com>,
John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, 30 Jan 2026 15:48:42 GMT
scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) wrote:

The shell is a very powerful feature, which unix borrowed from
Multics and extended. Previous to this the command interpreter
(like command.com) was part of the OS and couldn't be changed much.
To run a program, you had to type "run <program>" and programs
couldn't easily be connected.

To be fair, real operating systems (the set of which doesn't include
either Windows or MS-DOS), had mechanisms to add custom commands to
the command interpreter. DCL on VMS, for example, allowed user-
defined commands.

True, though the particulars varied by system; DCL was certainly one of
the more capable examples.

(I am curious, was Multics truly the first system to make user programs >first-class citizens of the command shell? It's such a natural way to
do things from a retrospective point of view that it seems hard to
imagine *nobody* else coming up with it 'til over a decade into the
history of interactive computing...)

The real genesis of the idea comes from "RUNCOM" on CTSS, as
described by Louis Pouzin, who coined the term "shell" to
descibe the command interpreter he proposed for Multics. As
usual, the Multicians web site has first-hand details: https://multicians.org/shell.html

- Dan C.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

To: Charlie Gibbs

Charlie Gibbs wrote to alt.folklore.computers <=-

Don't laugh. The other day I was on the phone with our
User from Hell - I was having trouble getting him to
double-click an icon.

My father was a batch job, IBM kinda guy. When he retired and I got him
a Windows PC (ostensibly to do financial consulting, he ended up
getting hooked on side-scroller games and posting on
alt.smokers.pipes), I'd help him over the phone. I'd ask him to
double-click on something and I'd hear:

<CLICK> 3 second pause <CLICK>.

The OS didn't recognize it as a double-click. He never really got the
hang of it, I had to change the double-click speed.

kurt weiske | kweiske at realitycheckbbs dot org
| http://realitycheckbbs.org
| 1:218/700@fidonet






--- MultiMail/Win v0.52
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Win32 NewsLink 1.2
* realitycheckBBS - Aptos, CA - telnet://realitycheckbbs.org

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

In article <10ll48q$2vbi7$1@dont-email.me>,
Peter Flass <Peter@Iron-Spring.com> wrote:

On 1/30/26 14:18, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:

On Fri, 30 Jan 2026 07:44:21 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

The shell is a very powerful feature, which unix borrowed from
Multics and extended.

Not sure if the shell ran as a separate process under Multics, though.
Multics still subscribed to the traditional idea of the user doing
just about everything within a single process context.

The Unix innovation of creating a separate process to run every
program was revolutionary because many saw it as wasteful and
inefficient, even if it did offer much greater flexibility.

I was waiting for a reply from someone who knows more about Multics than
I do. Seeing none, I'll say I believe a user runs everything in a single >process. Late in life I think there were some moves toward multiple >threads/processes.

When I first read about the unix model, it was also my reaction that it
was extremely wasteful of resources. Obviously having the system track >multiple processes and address spaces had to add to overhead. Now
systems are powerful enough that no one cares.

I'm told that early Unix was described as "profligate with
processes," but I've never found a direct quote.

- Dan C.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Lawrence =?iso-8859-13?q?D=FFOliveiro?= <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

On Fri, 30 Jan 2026 07:44:21 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

The shell is a very powerful feature, which unix borrowed from
Multics and extended.

Not sure if the shell ran as a separate process under Multics, though. >Multics still subscribed to the traditional idea of the user doing
just about everything within a single process context.

The Unix innovation of creating a separate process to run every
program was revolutionary

The Burroughs systems were doing that in the 60s. It wasn't revolutionary
in Unix.

If you substitute 'command' for 'program' in your statement, you
may be closer to accurate, but even the unix bourne shell executed some commands directly in the shell ('cd' being a prime example).

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

I know about :x and ZZ, but :wq is so deep-seated in my muscle memory
that I'll probably never change that habit.

And ZZ is a terrible idea. If you don't know whether you intended
to change the file, that'll just make sure that accidental changes
get committed blindly.

De

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-31, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On Sat, 31 Jan 2026 06:59:30 -0500, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:

I left a brightly lit parking lot with only my running lights on,
and they were quite enough for me to see while driving at night. Then I
was so flustered I pulled out a credit card instead of my license. :-D

I did the same at dusk. The cop saw the headlights and no taillights and pulled me over for defective equipment. That was the last Toyota and the DLRs were always on. This one has a separate setting for DLR but I don't
use it.

Around here I've seen an increase in the number of cars with no
tail lights at dusk or on rainy days. I consider this to be an
unintended consequence of daytime running lights.

As I mentioned upthread, DRLs were first implemented in the late '80s
using the high beam headlamps. Although their intensity is reduced
somewhat, they're still objectionably bright in many cases. Our 1998
Honda CR-V (and various other Honda models) are a good example. For
this reason I now leave my rear-view mirror on its night setting at
all times.

The irony is that moving your headlight switch to "on" actually
_reduces_ the amount of light reaching the eyes of other drivers.

One of the selling points for always on headlights on bikes was to help
them stand out in traffic. DLR negates that.

Some bicycle headlights have also become obnoxiously bright.
I was blinded in a bike shop by a demo - it took several minutes
for my vision to recover.

This is assuming, of course, that you even have lights when
riding at night. Enough people around here don't that you
wonder whether it's even a legal requirement, or just not
enforced.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

I'm told that early Unix was described as "profligate with
processes," but I've never found a direct quote.

"Get a fork, get a fork, get a fork fork fork"? :)

De

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 31 Jan 2026 11:59:48 GMT, Niklas Karlsson wrote:

I suppose one could write a shell that does support abbreviation.

Can?t see the point, myself. In a less dynamic environment (e.g. a DEC
OS), where new commands are not added that frequently, you might be
able to get away with it. In a typical *nix environment, I don?t think
it would work.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Sat, 31 Jan 2026 13:14:34 -0000 (UTC), Waldek Hebisch wrote:

Yes, the program obeys PAGER variable. But the problem is of having
sensible default for clueless users.

There is usually a system-default setting for users who haven?t
specified their own.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Sat, 31 Jan 2026 07:40:26 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

When I first read about the unix model, it was also my reaction that
it was extremely wasteful of resources. Obviously having the system
track multiple processes and address spaces had to add to overhead.

And also don?t forget the byte-stream model for accessing disk files,
where all the block buffering has to be managed in the kernel, instead
of in userland libraries as in traditional OSes.

All these were user/programmer conveniences, that would have seemed
quite radical at the time, because of how much they added to system
overhead.

Now systems are powerful enough that no one cares.

Even in the 1980s, the Unix way of doing things was already being seen
as something desirable, superior, and better than other OSes. So those
other OSes were starting to copy some of those features.

Worth also pointing out that, at the time of MS-DOS 2.0 with its
introduction of some bizarro-Unix features, the commonly-available PC
hardware was already more powerful than the original PDP-11 systems
that Unix was created on. So why couldn?t Microsoft (or IBM) provide a
full Unix-equivalent OS for PC hardware back then?

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Sat, 31 Jan 2026 19:22:30 +0000, Dennis Boone wrote:

And ZZ is a terrible idea.

?ZZ? to save and quit, ?:q!? to abandon changes and quit. Easy enough
to remember ...

I put up with vi in the early part of my Unix-admin days, until all
the proprietary Unixes (that I had to deal with) went extinct and
Linux became dominant. At that point I could assume that Emacs would
always be available (or at least easily installable), so I switched to
using that.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-31, Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Sat, 31 Jan 2026 19:22:30 +0000, Dennis Boone wrote:

And ZZ is a terrible idea.

?ZZ? to save and quit, ?:q!? to abandon changes and quit. Easy enough
to remember ...

"ZZ" never felt right to me; it was too inconsistent with other commands.
(e.g. :w, :w!, :q, and :q!). Maybe if it was ":zz" I might have felt
better about it. But then I discovered ":x" - consistent and short.

I put up with vi in the early part of my Unix-admin days, until all
the proprietary Unixes (that I had to deal with) went extinct and
Linux became dominant. At that point I could assume that Emacs would
always be available (or at least easily installable), so I switched to
using that.

I've looked at emacs a few times, but each time I come away thinking
that we're from different planets.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-31, Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

Worth also pointing out that, at the time of MS-DOS 2.0 with its
introduction of some bizarro-Unix features, the commonly-available PC hardware was already more powerful than the original PDP-11 systems
that Unix was created on. So why couldn?t Microsoft (or IBM) provide a
full Unix-equivalent OS for PC hardware back then?

Microsoft had Xenix, which was licenced from AT&T. The Mark Williams Corporation wrote Coherent from scratch as a work-alike.

I never used either of them, so I can't say much about their
look and feel.

ObHumour: Around the time of the many software court cases,
a cartoon came out of two exhausted lawyers exiting the
court room. One says to the other, "You look like I feel."

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.8
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Sat, 31 Jan 2026 22:52:46 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

On 2026-01-31, Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

Worth also pointing out that, at the time of MS-DOS 2.0 with its
introduction of some bizarro-Unix features, the commonly-available
PC hardware was already more powerful than the original PDP-11
systems that Unix was created on. So why couldn?t Microsoft (or
IBM) provide a full Unix-equivalent OS for PC hardware back then?

Microsoft had Xenix, which was licenced from AT&T.

But there was never any thought of making it more useful as a personal-computing-oriented OS.

For example, having a simple frame-buffer driver which allowed mapping
video RAM directly into a process address space. In lieu of a more
elaborate graphics API abstraction, that would have allowed the
greater immediacy of interactivity that was commonplace on single-user
systems at the time.

Instead, MS-DOS followed the CP/M mindset of treating the keyboard and
screen as though they were a dumb terminal at the other end of a
low-bandwidth serial line.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.10
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Sat, 31 Jan 2026 22:52:45 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

I've looked at emacs a few times, but each time I come away thinking
that we're from different planets.

I?ve always been accustomed to text editors where you could begin
entering text straight away, instead of having to enter some kind of
special ?insert? mode.

You?ve done command-line editing in Bash and other apps that used GNU
readline? The default key bindings for that come from Emacs.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.10
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-02-01, Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

I?ve always been accustomed to text editors where you could begin
entering text straight away, instead of having to enter some kind of
special ?insert? mode.

You?ve done command-line editing in Bash and other apps that used GNU readline? The default key bindings for that come from Emacs.

Yeah, I definitely swear by emacs-style behavior on the command line,
even though for editing text I swear by vi(m). It's an odd inconsistency
of mine, I suppose. vi style on the command line just wouldn't feel
right.

Niklas
--
Arguing about window managers, or shells, is like arguing
about which colour wrench to use to pound in screws.
-- David Gersic, asr

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.10
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 1 Feb 2026 05:44:59 GMT, Niklas Karlsson wrote:

Yeah, I definitely swear by emacs-style behavior on the command
line, even though for editing text I swear by vi(m).

I wonder why you would settle for an editor that doesn?t offer a GUI
mode.

Emacs can run both ways.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.10
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-02-01, Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On 1 Feb 2026 05:44:59 GMT, Niklas Karlsson wrote:

Yeah, I definitely swear by emacs-style behavior on the command
line, even though for editing text I swear by vi(m).

I wonder why you would settle for an editor that doesn?t offer a GUI
mode.

Emacs can run both ways.

And you think vim can't? Never heard of gvim?

That said, given the nature of my work, I often find myself working on
remote machines using SSH, and I don't usually really need the GUI
features when I'm doing that, so I just run vi(m) in terminal mode and
don't bother with tunneling X11.

Niklas
--
I hereby wish to register the band name "rm -rf /".
-- Jim

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.10
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-02-01, Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Sat, 31 Jan 2026 22:52:46 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

On 2026-01-31, Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

Worth also pointing out that, at the time of MS-DOS 2.0 with its
introduction of some bizarro-Unix features, the commonly-available
PC hardware was already more powerful than the original PDP-11
systems that Unix was created on. So why couldn?t Microsoft (or
IBM) provide a full Unix-equivalent OS for PC hardware back then?

Microsoft had Xenix, which was licenced from AT&T.

But there was never any thought of making it more useful as a personal-computing-oriented OS.

For example, having a simple frame-buffer driver which allowed mapping
video RAM directly into a process address space. In lieu of a more
elaborate graphics API abstraction, that would have allowed the
greater immediacy of interactivity that was commonplace on single-user systems at the time.

Instead, MS-DOS followed the CP/M mindset of treating the keyboard
and screen as though they were a dumb terminal at the other end of
a low-bandwidth serial line.

True, but if you're after a "Unix-equivalent OS", that's what Unix
was doing. Unless you're looking for an equivalent of X as well.
But X originated in 1984, while Xenix was released in 1980.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.10
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)