Re: How did AIX beat out i5/OS was: IBM tech support for BCS

[CRPence <crpbottle@xxxxxxxxx>]

  *IX are cheap OSes with their Command Line Interface origins being 
programming geeks, written for programming geeks, not written for the 
casual /users/; e.g. operators.  Powerful, but not so usable, for the 
non-geek.  You get what you pay for I guess.  It is much a side effect 
of those OS treating everything as a /file/ whereby even the command 
line input stream is a file; i.e. standard input.  Once something like 
5250 is inserted, a [STDIN] /file/ as stream input concept is somewhat 
vitiated.

  It is too bad that the anti-i and non-i contingents in IBM are so 
biased they ignored what was obviously better even if only for prompting 
and parameter context help; something from which they could have 
adopted, and adapted to make a more usable CLI for its *IX variant, 
giving it some real value over the others.  Alas, nobody seems to care 
about anything that is not GUI\browser-based.  Once down that path, a 
/command/ interface is really moot as far as most development [thought] 
is concerned.

Regards, Chuck

Steve Richter wrote:
> I want the AIX command line to function the same as command entry.
> Commands have a consistent name, are promptable, help is available on
> each parameter, commands can be logged to the joblog, scripts can be
> compiled as native programs on the platform.