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http://sintran.com/sintran/history/history.html http://sintran.com/sintran/history/history.html

• tannhaeuser 6y ago
  Coolest thing of SINTRAN (ND's O/S) was the command shell which was designed such that you could have expressive long names for commands and other files, yet could also use short forms for easy typing in a word-lattice kind of way (and more stylish than on Unix). For example, the "ls" command was "list-files" and you could write "li-fi" or "l-f" as long as there was no other command/executable in scope that would be ambiguous. Worked with more than a single hyphen as well (eg. set-file-permission etc.) Actually I implemented a Unix glob filter that did exactly that out of boredom on a project 20 years ago :) I guess emacs users and LISPers in general would be loving it (the concept not my C implementation that is).
  • thatfunkymunki 6y ago
    Cisco shell is like this, 'show running-config' becomes 'sh ru'
    • pinewurst 6y ago
      The Cisco shell is a direct descendent of the DEC TOPS-20 one BTW.
      • cat199 6y ago
        > direct descendent never heard anything like this - care to elaborate / point?
        • pinewurst 6y ago
          The Cisco founders were DEC20/TOPS20 fanatics from Stanford. It’s perfectly sensible that their chosen CLI would reflect their favorite example - and it really is an excellent CLI. Post Cisco, Len Bosack actually started a company, XKL, intending to build the next-gen DEC20. By the time this actually happened, the world had long moved on and XKL redirected to optical networks stuff.