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

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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