On Sat, Jul 31, 2021 at 12:18 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
Sorry, hit return too soon.   I remember an old AAUGN newsletter describing it.   If I recall it was original done for kermit.  The same idea is in tcsh also.  Which came first, I don't remember.  Cut/pasted from AAUGN Vol8 # 2

Frank da Cruz wrote a very nice reminiscence of the DECSYSTEM-20s at Columbia that discusses the creation of CCMD as they decommissioned the PDP-10s and switched to Unix on VAXen (and then Suns). http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/dec20.html

When I was a student, we were still given accounts on the CUNIX cluster; 64-bit SPARC machines running Solaris at the time. At the time, the actress Julia Styles was a student. One day, I was walking out of Mudd (the engineering building) with a friend of mine who suddenly grabbed my arm and said, "oh my god oh my god oh my god that's Julia Styles!" Being perpetually ignorant of popular culture, I had no idea who she was referring to confusedly thought she meant Julia Child, the late host of a cooking show. "...But I thought she was dead?" "No, Dan, that's Julia Child!" We decided to look up Ms Styles in the student directory, but being a celebrity she wasn't listed. However, one could still discover her "UNI" (login name) by grepping for her in the NIS password database. We did that and sent her an email: "Christy was too embarrassed to say hi to you and Dan thought you were Julia Child." Predictably, she did not respond. In retrospect, I idly wonder how many such emails she got, most presumably of the creepy variety, but we just thought ours was funny.

It appears that CUNIX still exists: https://cuit.columbia.edu/unix

        - Dan C.


-----------------
CCMD: A Version of COMND in C

Andrew Lowry
Howard Kaye

Columbia University

CCMD is a general parsing mechanism for developing User Interfaces to programs. It is based on the functionality of TOP5.20's COMND Jsys. CCMD allows a program to parse for various field types (file names, user names, dates and times, keywords, numbers, arbitrary text, tokens, etc.). It is meant to supply a homogeneous user interface across a variety of machines and operating systems for C programs. It currently runs under System V UNIX, 4.2/4.3 BSD, Ultrix 1.2/2.0, and MSDOS. The library defines various default actions (user settable), and allows field completion, help, file indirection, comments, etc. on a per field basis. Future plans include command line editing, command history, and ports to other operating systems (such as VMS).

CCMD is available for anonymous FTP from
[CU20B.COLUMBIA.EDU]WS:<SOURCE.CCMD>*.*

For further information, send mail to:

info-ccmd-request@cu20b.columbia.edu
seismo!columbia!cunixc!info-ccmd-request 



On Sat, Jul 31, 2021 at 12:03 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

On Sat, Jul 31, 2021 at 11:46 AM Richard Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:
Look for "comnd jsys" that exact spelling. Source code is around.