[TUHS] On computerese

[Dan Cross]

On Mon, Sep 30, 2024 at 1:22 PM Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 28, 2024 at 8:49 PM Aron Insinga <aki at insinga.com> wrote:
>> For the counter-example, I wonder if anyone ever tried to type very much (verbose) DCL on VAX/VMS using a Teletype. :-)
>>
> I had occasion to use an ASR model 33 Teletype with VAX/VMS.  Hated it.  The DECwriter LA36  was acceptable, though.
>
> While DCL commands generally involved complete words,  they could be abbreviated to the smallest unique abbreviation.  Thus one mostly typed DIR instead of DIRECTORY.  Command keywords also were be required to be unique in the first 4 characters--the DCL parser ignored all but the first four. characters.  The engineers at DEC's Marlboro MA facility named one of their networked machines TWINKIE so that to log into it they could type SET HOSTESS TWINKIE.
>
> The terse Unix command verb style can be a steep learning curve for beginners.  How is one supposed to know that you say 'ls' to get a directory listing?  And unfortunately man pages aren't very useful for beginners because you have to know what the command verb is in order to call up its man page.  Unix lacks a place to ask questions such as "how do I get a directory listing?".

This makes me wonder when the `apropos` command was introduced; surely
the name was also somewhat of an obscure joke ("what is apropos of
listing a directory?" is not exactly the phrase that springs
immediately to mind when wondering how to list a directory).

But the other form of it, `man -k`, is reasonable. Plan 9 called the
similar thing, `lookman`.

        - Dan C.