Xah Lee's Unixism

[jmfbahciv at aol.com]

In article <Pine.LNX.4.61.0409011503400.4389 at ppepc56.ph.gla.ac.uk>,
   "Alan J. Flavell" <flavell at ph.gla.ac.uk> wrote:
>On Wed, 1 Sep 2004 jmfbahciv at aol.com wrote:
>
>> You'ld probably get further about who's on first by knowing that
>> the guy who did OS-8 also did TOPS-10 monitor work.
>
>I have here my manual of the "Cambridge Multiple-Access System - 
>User's Reference Manual" (that's Cambridge, England) dated 1968.  The 
>file system hierarchy separator is "/".

And slash was used as a command modifier on the -10s.
File specification parsing used :: : [ ] < > , .
(Note that I did not use punctuation in that last sentence;
all those characters denoted a piece of a full file specification.
A slash said, "Here comes an exception to the last phrase
of the command."  

>
>I don't know where -they- got the convention from in the first place, 
>admittedly.

Trial and error.  Historic usage.  Typability.  Printability.
Not to mention the limitations of characters defined in the
ASCII-1964 standard.


>
>ObPDP:  the TITAN system had a PDP7 as a peripheral device, sort-of.

I don't think I ever met a PDP-7.

/BAH

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