Hello Rob,
Am 10.11.2022 um 19:14 schrieb Rob Berendt <rob@xxxxxxxxx>:
Another thought I had about this. Does a typical "user" get the scrolling screen when using a Unix screen?
Well, what is a typical user?
I can only offer insight through my limited experience with mainly system (co) admins, and developers. But then, many of them also have been trained by me, so I'm even less sure if my view is representative at all. Besides that, I had some friends of mine working with the shell, remotely on a common file server. They loved how a rm -rf almost always outperformed emptying the trashcan via Samba or Netatalk. :-) But they also admired the power of find and simple shell loops for mass-renaming of files and other regular cleanup measures of their files.
Most people I've worked with took a short but intense lesson showing them the most important parts of the system and command line, including a crash course with the vim editor. Afterwards I emphasized that they should always ask questions if in doubt. And not fear, because we have backups. Doing something wrong is also part of the learning process.
After getting accustomed to tab completion, they were mostly happy and no longer interested in using midnight commander or other full-screen facilities for moving files around.
But of course, there's more application work than just moving files? Sysadmins and some programmers are using a text editor more often compared to others. And DBAs hack away in their respective SQL frontend.
Or, think back decades ago, when university students dialed into the central computer on their university. They also got a command line after some funny noises from the modem speaker followed by a silent CONNECT 9600. But also there were/are full-screen applications such as email client, news reader, probably more, were readily available to be started from that command line. Most likely Colossal Cave Adventure, Star Trek, and Zork also were installed. :-)
What is a typical user? I guess, there's no such thing universally. Applications/products, company industry, company policy/preferences, and personal preferences are playing a major role. The best approach might be to roughly "group" users into
- people having been forced to use the computer with just one application they for doing their daily work, mostly ignorant and bearing some constant hatred about "the always misbehaving computer", and
- people who accept and embrace the computer as a tool, just like a screwdriver, to help them getting a task done with (hopefully) less effort compared to the without-computer-way.
Funnily, those categories are ubiquitous, no matter if IBM i, Linux, Windows, Mac, Mainframes or whatever. Not sure if very dedicated hobbyists are plenty enough to justify a third group?
So: In my niche, people definitely see the scrolling window.
For example, does an order entry clerk typically get a scrolling screen and then types in 'enter order' or some such thing?
I honestly don't know which kinds of applications are "out there". The closest encounter I had to something like that was in the early 2000s with a local bakery chain. A really old Dell PC server with 16 serial (RS-232) ports on a breakout cable, cables running everywhere to serial terminals on desks and production facilities. The main warehouse application was definitely full-screen, with different shades of grey for different areas of the application window. I dimly remember that users had the application hard coded in /etc/passwd, so it was started directly at logon time. No scrolling for those, and surely no motd to be seen. :-)
:wq! PoC
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