[TUHS] Re: On computerese

I'm not sure the answer was ever written down (e.g. in a memo); we will probably have to rely on memory - and memories that far back are now fairly thin on the ground by now. Perhaps Mr. McIlroy (or Mr. Thompson, if we're _really_ lucky) will humor us? :-) I have the impression that some of the names are _possibly_ inherited from Multics (which the early Unicians all used before Unix existed) - but maybe not. The command to list a directory, on Multics, is 'ls' (but see below) - but the Multics qcommand to remove a file is 'del' (not 'rm'); and change working directory is 'cwd'. So maybe ls' is just chance? Multics had a 'feature' where a segment (file) could have additional names (to the main name), and this is used to add short aliases to many commands, so the 'base name'' for the directory list command is 'list'; 'ls' is a short alias. A list of Multics commands (with short forms) is available here: https://www.multicians.org/multics-commands.html I'm not sure how early that alias mechanism came in, though; my copy of "Introduction to Multics" (February, 1974) doesn't have short names (or, at least, it doesn't use them). It won't have anything to do with disk and memory. Having used a Teletype, it would take noticeably longer to type in a longer name! It's also more effort and time. I would expect those are the reasons for the short names. Noel