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

Hi, Vern:

On any Unix (or Lunux) system, you execute the "man" command from any "shell" (command line), e.g.:

man grep

and it types out an abbreviated "manual page" for the named command.

Recall that in the early releases of Unix, users were usually working from printing terminals (teletypes and the like), so you could print out an abbreviated manual page, and then tear it off, and keep it handy as a "cheat-sheet" or ready reference, while working.

As printing terminals were replaced with "glass teletypes" this simplistic form of on-line help was never updated or improved upon.

(Apparently QSHELL and PASE do not even support the man command.)

By the way, this is not only true for Unix-like systems; IBM's VM/CMS HELP command worked very similar to the way "man pages" work, up through VM/370-CMS Rel. 6, and the same was true for MVS-TSO's HELP command. Here, too, CMS and TSO started life with printing terminals (BIM 2741s, etc.) and support for "full-screen" 3270 added only gradually. And IBM provided full-screen support for CMS and TSO mainly in the form of "add-on" (cost-extra) program products like ISPF/PDF (similar to PDM), and TSO session manager, etc.

Regards,

Mark S. Waterbury

> vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Chuck

I still have the original paper on interface design for the S/38 - very interesting as to the reason for the interface as it came out - and eventually turned into the 400 interface. All about usability for typical user, not *IX dweebs, who love to flash all those cryptic command line options - albeit very powerful. The 36 was more like that, and several folks wrote 1 or 2 character commands so they could type less - like waj for wrkactjob.

Prompting is, in my opinion, one of the coolest things the i has - and the online help - which is usually very sparse from the command line on NIX's - well, there are man pages, but you can't get to them when executing a command, I believe.

Vern

-------------- Original message -------------- From: 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.

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