> What I have been thinking for some years now is that what is > needed is better command line based shells with less cryptic > commands built out the more cryptic, with some emphasis on > speech modality, like ability to have the whole interaction in > a buffer that can be navigated forwards and backwards, by > screens or pages at a time, or by many other configurable > means. So yes, I agree, the current command line tools are > super powerful but not easy to use, and much work needs to > be done there. Basically we need something other than bash > as the shell, with different ideas as to how command line > should be interpreted, managed, and configured, and then > better applications to run in such an environment. A lot of the good ideas on designing user-friendly console interfaces are getting lost because today's programmers either work with a gui or they are nerdy enough to cope with the cryptic unix command-line. My husband restores old hardware, the way some people restore ancient cars. I've gotten to play with lots of old operating systems, and many, like Tops20, are a lot less cryptic than unix. To get ideas about how to implement console interfaces in old-fashioned operating systems, you might want to play with the fully accessible simh http://simh.trailing-edge.com Which is a simulator for old hardware. I've run simh on both linux and windows. Using simh I recently installed and played with RSTS/E on a simulated PDP-1170. Very fun and gives you a broader perspective. --Debee
