[Coco] No easy rename on OS-9 ?

[billg999 at cs.uofs.edu]

This stuff always annoys me...

>
> The programmers of Unix were rather bad typists, it would appear.  That's
> why we have so many abbreviated commands such as CP, LS, MV, CAT, etc.,
> etc. etc.

The reason for the short names was because at the time Unix was being
developed the user interface was a 60 WPM teletype.  It took real time
send a command and even more time to echo it back and print it.  People
today are unbelievably spoiled by the speed of their machines.  Try
running a terminal off the bitbanger while working on a system with only
one floppy running on the original controller.  That would give you an
approximation of their environment.

>           They were also very big on devising multiple ways of doing the
> same thing.

How so?  Give me some examples.

>             Unfortunately, they were also big on making one "command" do
> multiple tricks by burdening the commands with multiple switches and
> modifiers such that every command needed a rather large "man" page to
> identify all that could be accomplished by deft used of such "modifiers".

Total crap.  FSF/GNU started that.  The original Unix Paradigm was taken
from the Software Tools approach.  A program should do one task (and do
it well!!) and if multiple tasks are required, that's what pipes are for.

cat mydoc.txt | pic | eqn | tbl | nroff

> As computers grew in their complexity, the "commands" grew in the number
> of switches tacked on to them.

Blame RMS for that, not the designers of Unix.

>                                Mastery of this repertoire is what gave
> the UNIX user the coveted title of GURU.  The first versions of Linux were
> somewhat limited in their memory capacity, so that they could NOT support
> these bloated commands with dozens of switches, so their "versions" were
> somewhat similar to the original versions of these UNIX commands.  How
> "fortunate" of you to have a version of UNIX
>   that had enough memory to support all the hair involved with the extra
> burden of all those switches.

Your joking, right?  It was the proliferation of Linux that rapidly
increased this drive to make Unix commands complex.  Doing things
like combining find and cpio into one command when it worked just
fine as two with a pipe.

>                                     OS9 on the Coco was also limited,
> especially compared to the UNIX variants that were obtainable at the
> time, so their versions of these commands were somewhat limited as the
> early versions of Linux were.  Even so, it was possible to discover
> multiple ways of doing the same thing, thus adding another layer of
> similarity to UNIX.  The original idea behind CP vs. MV was preserved in
> the Coco version of OS9.  The version of OS9 that now exists, even for
> the Coco enhanced with 128K, 512K or 1M or more has the ability to
> rewrite some of these command to appear more like the "advanced" UNIXs
> that some are fondly familiar with.  It is a debatable as to whether
> this is a good thing or not.

There is no reason to make OS9 look like Unix beyond the fact that more
people are familiar with Unix.  I ve seen the same thing done on VMS and
even on MSDOS.  But then, Tandy had an MSDOS Shell for their Model 16
running XENIX.  And I once wrote a UCSD P-System shell (emulating the
menus system) for Unix.  There is no telling what one will do with a
little time on their hands.

But stop blaming Unix for the stupidity of those who came into the game
decades later.

bill
(who has been using Unix since Version 7 and OS9 since the initial
release of Level 1 by Tandy!!!)