I had occasion to use an ASR model 33 Teletype with VAX/VMS.  Hated it.  The DECwriter LA36  was acceptable, though.

While DCL commands generally involved complete words,  they could be abbreviated to the smallest unique abbreviation.  Thus one mostly typed DIR instead of DIRECTORY.  Command keywords also were be required to be unique in the first 4 characters--the DCL parser ignored all but the first four. characters.  The engineers at DEC's Marlboro MA facility named one of their networked machines TWINKIE so that to log into it they could type SET HOSTESS TWINKIE.

The terse Unix command verb style can be a steep learning curve for beginners.  How is one supposed to know that you say 'ls' to get a directory listing?  And unfortunately man pages aren't very useful for beginners because you have to know what the command verb is in order to call up its man page.  Unix lacks a place to ask questions such as "how do I get a directory listing?".

-Paul W.

-Paul W.