This is true. I have an old Bell Systems Journal which I have had for 20 years as well as the Lyons book that I got in 1980. Although CRT systems were available in the late 60s and early 70s, most were of the glass teletype version. In graduate school we ran a national business game where we use TTY to communicate with the participants all over the country. We got the output from punched cards off of an RCA Spectra 70(eg a 360 clone), read the cards into a DEC PDP-8, and produced a punched paper tape for each school. Then the students would manually dial each school's tty and send the results. On 25 Oct 2001, at 8:51, Paul Lussier wrote:
> Here's a bit of useless Unix trivia for you. The reason there are so > many 2 letter commands is rather amusing. If you'll notice, for the > most part, the 2 letter commands each have 1 letter from the right > side of the keyboard and one from the left. Back in the late 1960s, > the only keyboards were the old teletype/DECWriter style terminals. > These things were virtually impossible to touch type on to begin > with. So, to make things easier and more efficient for themselves, > the architects of Unix created easy to remember commands they could > stab with one finger on each hand. > > I don't remember where I heard/read this, but many commands seem to > fit this scheme: ls, pr, mt, od, ps, bc, mv... Jerry Feldman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Associate Director Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org ********************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the following text in the *body* (*not* the subject line) of the letter: unsubscribe gnhlug **********************************************************
