🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Nov21.214001.925@m.cs.uiuc.edu> coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu (John Coolidge) writes:

   I wouldn't argue that there's ANYTHING innovative in
   Tenex/TOPS-20 or VM/CMS (expecially the second). They're ugly command-
   line interfaces, period.

   On the other hand, I would consider GEM (both the potentially infriging
   version and the later version), the MacOS (all versions), raw X, MOTIF,
   OPEN LOOK, NeXTStep, AmigaDOS, and many others as examples of user
   interfaces developed post-1981.

Things happen when it's time for them to. The Tenex/TOPS-20
command-line interface took shape when the only commercially viable
technology was timesharing and ascii terminals. Within that basic
framework, they developed context-sensitive prompting and help,
command completion, integrated automatic filename parsing, support for
hierarchical command structures, and a modular software design that
made it easy to extend the command processor with program-specific
data types. Quite a lot of innovation, actually. 

Sometime around 1981 bitmapped graphics made it out of PARC and SAIL
and MIT and into commercial reality. Once the new medium was
available, people started to develop new interfaces which could take
advantage of it. Simple as that.

				-john
				jtw@lcs.mit.edu