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

*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.