[COFF] Other OSes?

[lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)]

On Thu, Jul 05, 2018 at 04:11:57PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:
> On Thu, 05 Jul 2018 13:49:58 -0700 "Steve Johnson" <scj at yaccman.com> wrote:
> > That's an interesting topic, but it also gets my mind thinking about UNIX
> > features that were wonderful but didn't evolve as computers did.
> > 
> > My two examples of this are editor scripts and shell scripts. In the day, I
> > would write at least one shell script and several editor scripts a day.  Most
> > of them were 2-4 lines long and used once.  But they allowed operations to be
> > done on multiple files quite quickly and safely.
> > 
> > With the advent of glass teletypes, shell scripts simply evaporated -- there
> > was no equivalent.  (yes, there were programs like sed, but it wasn't the
> > same...).  Changing, e.g., a function name oin 10 files got a lot more tedious.
> > 
> > With the advent of drag and drop and visual interfaces, shell scripts
> > evaporated as well.  Once again, doing something on 10 files got harder than
> > before.  I still use a lot of shell scripts, but mostly don't write them from
> > scratch any more.
> 
> With specialized apps there is less need for the kind of
> things we used to do.  While some of us want lego technic,
> most people simply want preconstructed toys to play with.

Years and years ago, decades ago, I worked on a time series picker that
had a pretty cool interface.  Yeah, it was a GUI tool with all the menus,
etc, but it also had a console prompt because all the menus had keyboard
shortcuts.  What was neat about it was that as you pulled down menus and
did stuff, which was a process where you'd go through several things to
get what you want, the console would fill in with the shortcuts.

So if you hadn't used it for a while, using it basically taught you the
shortcuts.  It was pretty slick, I wish all guis worked like that.