9 Mar
2020
9 Mar
'20
8:22 p.m.
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).
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