Xah Lee's Unixism

[Brian Inglis]

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 21:36:14 -0500 in alt.folklore.computers,
rpw3 at rpw3.org (Rob Warnock) wrote:

>Craig A. Finseth  <news at finseth.com> wrote:
>+---------------
>| Ville Vainio  <ville at spammers.com> wrote:
>| >... and / as path separator still screws up most of their cmd line
>| >programs (which think / is for command line options).
>| >Microsoft probably thought avoiding compatibility is a good idea, and
>| >have only lately started to have some regrets...
>| 
>| Wrong.  The / was chosen as the command line option separator because
>| whoever wrote MSDOS was looking to CP/M, who modelled their commands
>| after a PDP-11 operating system (RT-11?).
>+---------------
>
>Which, like PS/8 & OS-8 [and "DECsystem-8" from Geordia Tech] for the
>PDP-8, modelled the command syntax after that of the venerable PDP-10!!
>
>+---------------
>| Consider the "PIP" command.
>+---------------
>
>Indeed. And COPY & DEL & DIR, etc.

But CP/M also derived from IBM VM CP(!) and CMS:

	mount a ...
	attach con/rdr/lst/pun ...

It's been too long!

-- 
Thanks. Take care, Brian Inglis 	Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Brian.Inglis at CSi.com 	(Brian[dot]Inglis{at}SystematicSW[dot]ab[dot]ca)
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