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<p>Difficult to say; TENEX was put officially on the air on June 15,
1970. This is a year after the PDP-7 version of Unix was online
in 1969. The PDP-11 C port was essentially complete in 1971. The
CDC 6600 proceeds both by coming online in 1964. NOS very well
could have had it first.<br>
</p>
<p>TENEX's recognition based parsing was first only built into the
EXEC. Tops-20 fully regularized this along with file name
recognition in both <font size="+1"><tt>GTJFN%</tt></font> and <font
size="+1"><tt>COMND%</tt></font>. To my knowledge, it is still
the only platform where this functionality is a system function
and is available to all programs. In fact, the control fork of my
extended mode FTP server uses it to parse for RFC959 verbs.<br>
</p>
<p>As both the 6600 and TENEX were on the ARPAnet, it is completely
plausible that they cross-fertilized each other. The 6600 was an
amazing machine; we were still studying the ground breaking
architecture in the 1980's; register score boarding and
everything. Wow.<br>
</p>
<p>When we moved off of Tops-20 to Ultrix, one of the first things
we did was to re-implement COMND% in C and you can see it in use
in Columbia C-MM (mail manager) program. I don't believe the
library was ever generally released, which is a shame. I think I
still have a copy of it <i>somewhere</i>. Hmm...<br>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">On 3/9/20 3:22 PM, Paul Koning wrote:
I wonder if the CDC 6000 series console was an inspiration for that. It had some fairly long commands, but it would autocomplete unconditionally, supplying the next character whenever there was only one possibility at that point in the string.
So the command "check point system." would require only "che", the software would supply the rest. Oh yes, and whenever the command was complete (CR allowed at this point) the display would "ripple intensify", brightening every 4th character in a ripple pattern.
All this was in NOS 1 and I'm pretty sure goes back a ways further, so to early 1970s if not earlier.
paul
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">On Mar 9, 2020, at 3:17 PM, Thomas DeBellis <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:tommytimesharing@gmail.com"><tommytimesharing@gmail.com></a> wrote:
...
What's more likely has happened with respect to time formattong is cross-fertilization. Operating systems have lifted ideas from each other.
... • Tab recognition for shells is right out of COMND% on Tops-20 (except all native Tops-20 programs have it).
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