[TUHS] Is the Teletype the unsung hero of Unix?

[TUHS] Is the Teletype the unsung hero of Unix?

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2016-04-02 04:00, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:

> On Saturday,  2 April 2016 at  1:06:58 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>> On Mon, 28 Mar 2016, scj at yaccman.com wrote:
>>
>>> ...  and I once heard an old-timer growl at a young programmer "I've
>>> written boot loaders that were shorter than your variable names!"
>>
>> Ah, the 512-byte boot blocks...  We got pretty inventive in those days
>> (and this was before secondary loaders!) with line editing etc.
>
> I was thinking more of the RIM loader on the PDP-8.  16 words or 24
> bytes.

Bah! The RK8E bootloader for OS/8: 2 words... :-)

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

[TUHS] Is the Teletype the unsung hero of Unix?

[Charles Anthony]

On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 7:17 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at update.uu.se> wrote:

> On 2016-04-02 04:00, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
>
> On Saturday,  2 April 2016 at  1:06:58 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, 28 Mar 2016, scj at yaccman.com wrote:
>>>
>>> ...  and I once heard an old-timer growl at a young programmer "I've
>>>> written boot loaders that were shorter than your variable names!"
>>>>
>>>
>>> Ah, the 512-byte boot blocks...  We got pretty inventive in those days
>>> (and this was before secondary loaders!) with line editing etc.
>>>
>>
>> I was thinking more of the RIM loader on the PDP-8.  16 words or 24
>> bytes.
>>
>
> Bah! The RK8E bootloader for OS/8: 2 words... :-)
>
>
DPS8-M: 11 36-bit words. Sad. But on the other hand, no actual CPU
instructions. All addresses and Channel Control Words and Data.

-- Charles
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[TUHS] Is the Teletype the unsung hero of Unix?

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Saturday,  2 April 2016 at  1:06:58 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Mar 2016, scj at yaccman.com wrote:
>
>> ...  and I once heard an old-timer growl at a young programmer "I've
>> written boot loaders that were shorter than your variable names!"
>
> Ah, the 512-byte boot blocks...  We got pretty inventive in those days
> (and this was before secondary loaders!) with line editing etc.

I was thinking more of the RIM loader on the PDP-8.  16 words or 24
bytes.

Greg
--
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[TUHS] Is the Teletype the unsung hero of Unix?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Mon, 28 Mar 2016, scj at yaccman.com wrote:

> ...  and I once heard an old-timer growl at a young programmer "I've 
> written boot loaders that were shorter than your variable names!"

Ah, the 512-byte boot blocks...  We got pretty inventive in those days 
(and this was before secondary loaders!) with line editing etc.

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] Is the Teletype the unsung hero of Unix?

[scj]

> On 25/03/2016 16:43, Aharon Robbins wrote:
>> I have long theorized that the reason for the short names is that since
>> typing was so physically demanding, it was natural to make the command
>> names (and all the rest) be short and easier to type.  I don't know if
>> this was a conscious decision, but I suspect it more likely to have been
>> an unconscious / natural one.
>
> In a paper we will present at this year's International Conference on
> Software Engineering we show (among other things) that the mean length
> of identifiers in Unix C source code has risen from 3.5 to 7.5
> characters from 1973 until today. We also observed a corresponding rise
> in the length of lines and files. Better terminals can be one reason for
> this rise. Other possible reasons may be increased software complexity
> as well as CPU power and memory that allowed the processing of more
> verbose code.
>
> I've uploaded a preprint at
> http://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/pubs/conf/2016-ICSE-ProgEvol/html/SLK16.pdf
>
>
...  and I once heard an old-timer growl at a young programmer "I've
written boot loaders that were shorter than your variable names!"

Steve

[TUHS] Is the Teletype the unsung hero of Unix?

[Steve Nickolas]

On Sat, 26 Mar 2016, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:

> On Saturday, 26 March 2016 at  0:30:42 -0400, Steve Nickolas wrote:
>>
>> That said, just yesterday I was wondering what the heck
>> "TANGALA.BAS" on my hard drive was.  (It was a TANdy 1000 program
>> that played the startup jingle from GALAga.)
>
> http://xkcd.com/1360/

Too true.  And that's why I have 5 nearly full multi-terabyte hard drives.

-uso.

[TUHS] Is the Teletype the unsung hero of Unix?

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Saturday, 26 March 2016 at  0:30:42 -0400, Steve Nickolas wrote:
>
> That said, just yesterday I was wondering what the heck
> "TANGALA.BAS" on my hard drive was.  (It was a TANdy 1000 program
> that played the startup jingle from GALAga.)

http://xkcd.com/1360/

Greg
--
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[TUHS] Is the Teletype the unsung hero of Unix?

[Steve Nickolas]

On Sat, 26 Mar 2016, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:

> Even now I tend to shorten file names.  And I suspect I'm not the only
> person who hates these excessively long
> --options-that-could-have-been-written-more-succinctly.  Probably it's
> at least partially a mentality issue.

I still like one-letter switches, and my programs sometimes use tons upon 
tons of them.

Even well into the days of tab completion, I still often keep my filenames 
down to 8 characters or less plus extension, which leaves people wondering 
what the heck "L34-01.MP4" is. (spoiler: "Lupin the 3rd, Part IV, Episode 
1")

That said, just yesterday I was wondering what the heck "TANGALA.BAS" on 
my hard drive was.  (It was a TANdy 1000 program that played the startup 
jingle from GALAga.)

-uso.

[TUHS] Is the Teletype the unsung hero of Unix?

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Friday, 25 March 2016 at 17:43:08 +0300, Aharon Robbins wrote:
>
> ...
>
> I certainly think there's some truth to this idea; longer command
> names and especially GNU style long options didn't appear until the
> video terminal era when terminals were faster (9600 or 19200 baud!)
> and much less physically demanding to use.  How MUCH correlation is
> there, I don't claim to know, but I think there's definitely some.

Certainly, but the question is whether it's enough to imply causality.
I am a very fast typer, but when we got our Tandem machines back in
1977, we discovered that the shell was called COMINT and the editor
was called EDIT.  Too long for my liking, so I shortened them to C and
E respectively, much to the disgust of the field technicians.  This
was long before I was exposed to Unix, and we were really happy with
our 9600 bps ADM-2s, so much faster than the IBM 3270s we had been
using on the /370.

Even now I tend to shorten file names.  And I suspect I'm not the only
person who hates these excessively long
--options-that-could-have-been-written-more-succinctly.  Probably it's
at least partially a mentality issue.

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key.
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[TUHS] Is the Teletype the unsung hero of Unix?

[Diomidis Spinellis]

On 25/03/2016 16:43, Aharon Robbins wrote:
> I have long theorized that the reason for the short names is that since
> typing was so physically demanding, it was natural to make the command
> names (and all the rest) be short and easier to type.  I don't know if
> this was a conscious decision, but I suspect it more likely to have been
> an unconscious / natural one.

In a paper we will present at this year's International Conference on 
Software Engineering we show (among other things) that the mean length 
of identifiers in Unix C source code has risen from 3.5 to 7.5 
characters from 1973 until today. We also observed a corresponding rise 
in the length of lines and files. Better terminals can be one reason for 
this rise. Other possible reasons may be increased software complexity 
as well as CPU power and memory that allowed the processing of more 
verbose code.

I've uploaded a preprint at 
http://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/pubs/conf/2016-ICSE-ProgEvol/html/SLK16.pdf

[TUHS] Is the Teletype the unsung hero of Unix?

[Jaap Akkerhuis]

> <SNIP>
> One of Unix's signature hallmarks is its terseness: short command names
> like mv, ln, cp, cc, ed; short options (a dash and a single letter),
> programs with just a few, if any, options at all, and short path names:
> "usr" instead of "user", "src" instead of "source" and so on.
> <SNIP>

Peter Collinson wrote in 1983 an article on this subject.  It is
available at <http://www.hillside.co.uk/articles/typing.html>.

	jaap


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[TUHS] Is the Teletype the unsung hero of Unix?

[Aharon Robbins]

Hi TUHSers,

For a long time now, I have had a theory that I've never seen
substantiated (or disproved) in print.  After Steve Johnson's recollection
of how hard it was to type on the Teletype terminals, I'm going to throw
this thought out for consideration.

One of Unix's signature hallmarks is its terseness: short command names
like mv, ln, cp, cc, ed; short options (a dash and a single letter),
programs with just a few, if any, options at all, and short path names:
"usr" instead of "user", "src" instead of "source" and so on.

I have long theorized that the reason for the short names is that since
typing was so physically demanding, it was natural to make the command
names (and all the rest) be short and easier to type.  I don't know if
this was a conscious decision, but I suspect it more likely to have been
an unconscious / natural one.

Today, I started wondering if this wasn't at least part of the reason
for commands being simple, with few if any options.  After all, if I
have to type 'man foo' to remember how foo works, I don't want to wait
for 85 pages of printout (at 110 characters per second!) to finally see
what option -z does after wading through the descriptions of options -a
through -y.

I certainly think there's some truth to this idea; longer command
names and especially GNU style long options didn't appear until the
video terminal era when terminals were faster (9600 or 19200 baud!) and
much less physically demanding to use.  How MUCH correlation is there,
I don't claim to know, but I think there's definitely some.

For the record, I did use the paper teletypes some, mainly at a university
where I took summer classes, connected to a Univac system.  I remember
how hard it was to use them.  You could almost set your watch by when
it would crash around noon time, as the load went up. :-)  On Unix I
only used VDTs, except if I was at a console DECwriter.

Anyway, that's my thought. :-) Comments and or insights, especially from
those who were there, would be welcome.

Thanks,

Arnold