Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix

From: Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>
To: Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>
Cc: Computer Old Farts Followers <coff@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2022 09:32:14 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CANCZdfq4ti5h=hsRCV0440tCobxWXZknZXWxmY527aYHiN6WtQ@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAC20D2MiFpDiZQmXyNTx43UG_OMHrtSm65Tyqw4M-LM7LZOtyg@mail.gmail.com>

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On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 9:20 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> To be fair, its not an unusual behavior.  Folks coming from VMS (or
> windows) try to make Unix look like that.  And what did we do with VMS, we
> added the cshell and Unix tools so people like me could type on it.   I'm
> currently being driven nuts by the simh tool which has a very TOPS/VMS
> style feel.  Everything is help commands. The documents are quite sparse.
> To me the documents/book (or man pages) should primarily ' go to' and if
> you want something like 'help' then create it from the documents.  But I
> can not really complain. It's a wonderful tool and its author comes from
> that heritage not Unix.  The problem I remind him is that he will get silly
> questions from people like me, because we can not find things in his help
> system - its just not how a Unix program tends to work [I want to look in
> the index of the document, and find the section myself].
>

The different worldviews are instructive. c-kermit had a tops-20 cmd
JSYS built into it and all the escape completion just worked. The  help was
quite good, but as with most help systems it was a zoomed in on some
hyperspecific topic. For that it was usually good (across all the TOPS-20
and VMS and that ilk), but sometimes you got things like "/GERBILS
specifies the gerbils to use" without really telling you what a gerbil was
in this context. what you didn't get was how things held together (eg
/HAMSTERS and /GERBILS worked hand in hand to control parameters to the
rodent models used to generate the ecosystem) or some of the higher level
concepts (like what an ecosystem was).

I used to read the raw VMS help files. They were a verbose version of the
Unix manuals in some ways, though less crisp in others. It was helpful to
read it all to understand, but even so some important concepts were
omitted, or discussed elsewhere w/o a proper cross reference.

Warner

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