On Wed, 6 Nov 2013 16:15:56 -0500, Rich Greenberg wrote: > >A historical note for Gerhard and others who wonder about the cryptic >commands in Unix (and derivatives). It was largely because of what was >available as interactive terminals at the time. Sloooooow TTYs. 60 to >100 chars per minute. Note: Thats per minute, not per second. So >commands were as short as possible. "cp" is half as many chars as "copy". >On the "mass" storage of the time (i.e. paper tape), "copy" would have >been twice as long (both on the tape and the sending time). > I was never acquainted with anything slower than the Teletype 33, which was 10 characters/second, or 600/minute. But I guess all things are possible under the sun.
And very few programmers can overrun 10 CPS -- that's 120 WPM. Apparently champion typists do about twice that. But I think attributing terse commands to terminal speed is an Urban Legend. The brevity has the same motivation as that of OS operator commands -- the bottleneck is not the terminal speed but the operator's dexterity. (Hmmm. "A" stands for "release". "P" stands for "stop". "T" stands for "set". "E" stands for requeue. Etc. I think.) No rollover on the TTY 33 -- it paced you with a vengeance. But after each keystroke you could lean on the next key until the keyboard unlocked; a strange form of tactile feedback. The only use of mains electric power in the TTY 33 was to drive a motor. I would have thought it a neat hack if someone were to run a TTY 33 on a small steam engine with a flyball governor. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
