I of course defer to dmr about the major influence, but I very much appreciated the brevity when printing programs and shell scripts and lines in ed at 110 baud, even with a terminal having a respectable keyboard.  I printed much more than I entered.

On Wed, Feb 5, 2020 at 10:38 AM Jaap Akkerhuis <jaapna@xs4all.nl> wrote:

> I have always suspected that the brevity of the Unix command names was strongly
> influenced by the clunky keyboards on the teletypes that were being used.  Can
> anyone confirm, deny, and/or comment on this?

Peter Collinson made the same observation at the 25th year celebration
of UNIX (USENIX, Washington) and it was confirmed by dmr.

        jaap