9 Mar
2020
9 Mar
'20
8:43 p.m.
Difficult to say; TENEX was put officially on the air on June 15, 1970.?
This is a year after the PDP-7 version of Unix was online in 1969.? The
PDP-11 C port was essentially complete in 1971.? The CDC 6600 proceeds
both by coming online in 1964.? NOS very well could have had it first.
TENEX's recognition based parsing was first only built into the EXEC.?
Tops-20 fully regularized this along with file name recognition in both
GTJFN% and COMND%.? To my knowledge, it is still the only platform where
this functionality is a system function and is available to all
programs.? In fact, the control fork of my extended mode FTP server uses
it to parse for RFC959 verbs.
As both the 6600 and TENEX were on the ARPAnet, it is completely
plausible that they cross-fertilized each other.? The 6600 was an
amazing machine; we were still studying the ground breaking architecture
in the 1980's; register score boarding and everything.? Wow.
When we moved off of Tops-20 to Ultrix, one of the first things we did
was to re-implement COMND% in C and you can see it in use in Columbia
C-MM (mail manager) program.? I don't believe the library was ever
generally released, which is a shame.? I think I still have a copy of it
/somewhere/.? Hmm...
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 3/9/20 3:22 PM, Paul Koning wrote:
I wonder if the CDC 6000 series console was an inspiration for that. It had some fairly
long commands, but it would autocomplete unconditionally, supplying the next character
whenever there was only one possibility at that point in the string.
So the command "check point system." would require only "che", the
software would supply the rest. Oh yes, and whenever the command was complete (CR allowed
at this point) the display would "ripple intensify", brightening every 4th
character in a ripple pattern.
All this was in NOS 1 and I'm pretty sure goes back a ways further, so to early 1970s
if not earlier.
paul
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> On Mar 9, 2020, at 3:17 PM, Thomas DeBellis <tommytimesharing at gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> ...
> What's more likely has happened with respect to time formattong is
cross-fertilization. Operating systems have lifted ideas from each other.
>
> ... ? Tab recognition for shells is right out of COMND% on Tops-20 (except all native
Tops-20 programs have it).