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The thing that caught my attention (and nobody else has commented on) is that things we take for granted, most notably a command-line interface, is something th
by dhosek 3y ago
The thing that caught my attention (and nobody else has commented on) is that things we take for granted, most notably a command-line interface, is something that had to be invented.¹ A big part of my first job (at the UIC computing center in the mid-80s) was helping people figure out what was wrong with their JCL jobs they were sending to the MVS half of our IBM mainframe which had a command line (TSO) but which was an unpleasant thing to work with, especially compared to the CMS side of the mainframe which even had nice screen-based interactions. It’s a bit startling to realize that I’m older than the command line.
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1. Similarly, the idea of arranging the words in a dictionary by alphabetical order was something that only happened for the first time sometime around the 15th century (plus or minus a century maybe?) if I recall correctly. It seems obvious now, but why not arrange the words by, e.g., what sort of thing they’re about? After all, perhaps what you want from a dictionary is not to find out what a word means, but to find the right word to describe what you want to write about.
- stevefolta 3y ago> ...why not arrange the words by, e.g., what sort of thing they’re about? I don't know if that exists, but there are rhyming dictionaries.
- dhosek 3y agoSome early dictionaries did in fact do this, and this was also the case with Roget’s project with his thesaurus (most contemporary thesauri arrange the main headings in alphabetical order, thus the title, “Roget’s Thesaurus in Dictionary Form”) where he arranged the words in a tree of classifications. Most rhyming dictionaries are still alphabetical, but I think it was Webster’s that kept a file of headwords alphabetized in reverse order (so order would be sorted as redro, reverse as esrever, etc.) to facilitate the creation of rhyming dictionaries, but a case could be made that this order could be useful on its own.
- taylorius 3y agoA thesaurus - sort of.
- dhosek 3y agoThe original very much so, actually.
- eddd-ddde 3y agoIsn't this what enciclopedias are? You have animals in one section, you have countries in another, you have every component in a motor vehicle in another, etc.
- dhosek 3y agoI’ve never encountered an encyclopedia arranged like that. All that I’ve seen were strictly alphabetical with China next to Chipmunk
- eddd-ddde 3y agoPerhaps encyclopaedia is not the word. As a kid I had tons of book like this. I still remember one of my favourites had a whole section on what I believe was housing temperature control and insulation!
- heresie-dabord 3y ago> I’m older than the command line. Many people are. ^_^ > but why not arrange the words by, e.g., what sort of thing they’re about? Organisation of words by letter is fast indexing for an ordered set of letters. That said, visual dictionaries exist, such as the Stoddart. [1] [1] _ https://search.worldcat.org/title/1039974083 https://search.worldcat.org/title/1039974083
- dhosek 3y agoWhat I’m saying is that it wasn’t immediately obvious when the first dictionaries were created that this was the best way to do it.
- Mlller 3y agoRegarding the alphabetical order, I think one of the oldest alphabetically organized dictonaries extant is ‘Alphabetical collection of all words’ by Hesýchios¹. In his preface (written as a letter to a friend named Eulogios), Hesychios writes that quite a few other people in earlier times have made alphabetical collections of words, but always only for a certain subset, e.g. all homeric words, all words found in the tragedies or in the comedies etc. After them a certain Diogenianós was the first (according to Hesychios) to make an alphabetical collection of all words.² The names of the older lexicographers Hesychios mentions are: Appíon (Ἀππίων – or Ἀπίων?)³, Apollónios son of Archibios (Ἀπολλώνιος ὁ τοῦ Ἀρχιβίου)⁴, Théon (Θέων)⁵, Dídymos (Δίδυμος)⁶. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesychius_of_Alexandria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesychius_of_Alexandria ² https://el.wikisource.org/wiki/Epistula_ad_Eulogium https://el.wikisource.org/wiki/Epistula_ad_Eulogium – “κατὰ στοιχεῖον” is the phrase meaning ‘by / according to the letter’, understood as ‘alphabetical(ly)’; “καθʼ ἕκαστον στοιχεῖον” ‘by / according to every letter’. ³ a search turned up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apion ⁴ certainly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollonius_the_Sophist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollonius_the_Sophist ⁵ I donʼt know, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aelius_Theon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aelius_Theon perhaps? ⁶ a search turned up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didymus_Chalcenterus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didymus_Chalcenterus