Bizarre Command (was Re: RAM disk)

Stephen C. Trier trier at cwlim.INS.CWRU.Edu
Wed Oct 24 03:52:35 AEST 1990


>> Bell Labs commissioned independant studies early in Unix's history to
>> see if this was important or not. I've tried to locate these, others
>> have claimed to have been involved and seen the reports....

A paper we were assigned for a class in software engineering contains a
reference to one such study, made at Bell Labs.  The reference is to
"A Computer Command by any Other Name: A Study of Text Editing Terms",
by T. K. Landauer, K. Galotti, and S. Hartwell at Bell Labs.  As of 1981,
the paper was "available from the authors at Bell Labs".

The article containing the above reference is "The Trouble with Unix", by
Donald A. Norman, in what appears to be _Datamation_, November, 1981.  (The
citation is almost illegible.)  The reference to "A Computer Command" is
given within a text box defending Unix, written by Micheal Lesk of Bell Labs.

This isn't much to go on, but if someone really wants to track this down,
this is a starting point.  You can probably e-mail one of these people to
see about availability of the paper.

This is getting kind of off-topic.  In the interest of maintaining world
peace, please followup to comp.unix.misc.

-- 
Stephen Trier                              Case Western Reserve University
Work: trier at cwlim.ins.cwru.edu             Information Network Services
Home: sct at seldon.clv.oh.us



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