> if these researchers were working on home computing, they would’ve just run circles around microproblems like whether the more verbose “remove_directory” is m

> if these researchers were working on home computing, they would’ve just run circles around microproblems like whether the more verbose “remove_directory” is more usable than “rmdir,” and no one would’ve bothered with the unpublishable plumbing of building mice and browsers and interfaces. I guess we're lucky that research labs like SRI (mouse and direct manipulation), Xerox PARC (WYSIWYG, GUI, Ethernet, laser printers, etc.), CERN and NCSA (web, browsers) had better systems researchers than the ones your friend is complaining about. Regarding "remove_directory", Multics had user-friendly verbose names in addition to cryptic (but easy to type) abbreviations. Seems like another good idea that was lost in the transition to Unix.