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

Mark

Yeah, that I know - I was not clear in my statement - meant to say that you can't get to the man page for, say, grep, from within a prompt for grep. Unlike the F1 help within a command that is my lifesaver so often. I guess I don't feel like memorizing all the arcane flags.

;-)

Vern

-------------- Original message --------------
From: "Mark S. Waterbury" <mark.s.waterbury@xxxxxxx>

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