Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!rutgers!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!jade!eris!mwm From: mwm@eris.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike Meyer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Proposal for an Amiga Shell Message-ID: <2258@jade.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: Mon, 19-Jan-87 08:45:57 EST Article-I.D.: jade.2258 Posted: Mon Jan 19 08:45:57 1987 Date-Received: Tue, 20-Jan-87 23:01:49 EST References: <2255@jade.BERKELEY.EDU> Sender: usenet@jade.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: mwm@eris.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike Meyer) Organization: Missionaria Phonibalonica Lines: 77 Keywords: Amiga shell CLI Sili(Con:) windows In article <2255@jade.BERKELEY.EDU> pete@topaz.berkeley.edu.UUCP () writes: >In his "Proposal for an Amiga Shell", Mike Meyer omitted a little bit of >information. He didn't mention that his basic proposals for the shell's >user interface actually exist already as working features of my own >enhanced CLI "Sili(Con:)". Although I know it's not usually done to >advertise one's own products on the net, I felt that at least I had to >establish Prior Art! Thanks for giving me warning about this, Pete - it gave me time to think of a proper answer! To wit, I'm going to trace the ideas behind two windows, the input window and the history window (you'll notice they aren't quite the same as your Sili(Con:), though - I split them up into two windows, instead of one window with two panes), by showing where I first saw some of the basic features: Separate input/output: Gosling emacs. " " in windows: UO LISP History: InterLISP click to select, double-click to run: Apple LISA Selectable/editable history: ksh History in a separate window: Me(*) (*) In working on mg, I decided that I wanted to add a shell interface, but in a way that dumb (read: Messy-DOS) machines could do. So I invented an interface with a "submit-to-shell" command that put the output in one buffer, and appended the command to a shell history buffer. I then implemented that for GNU, and gave it to the development group. That was back in August or so. So you see, I can actually prove that Sili(con:) had nothing to do with the ms :-). Of course my reaction was to Sili(con:) was "Gee, that's neat & obvious. Why didn't *I* think of it?" That was one of the things that started me thinking about what you could do if you got SERIOUS about an Amiga shell, and I lifted large parts of the user interface from Pete's work, tweaked a little by all of the above, plus lots of other window-ish things. In any case, I wanna congratulate Pete on creating an AmigaDOS CLI that uses the workstation-like aspects of the machine, as opposed to porting an interface from another, inferior (:-) OS, or making some minor improvements on the supplied CLI. >In any case Sili(Con:) is shareware, so maybe it's >OK. Mike admits that my program (which I showed him a few weeks before >Christmas) was one of his idea sources. Of course there are many other >suggestions in his paper as well, that aren't yet implemented in any Amiga >program that I know of; I'll try to submit some comments on those later, >when I've thought about it a while. Please do. I've already changed the paper to explicitly mention that "there are ~ ALEPHnull sources for those ideas, so they won't be mentioned" (the custimization stuff is as messy, covering things from Nanodata, IBM, and lotsa people in between!) based on talking to you about it. >I won't go on in detail here, because I've about covered its relation to >Mike's proposal. Of course I'm working on further versions, and I might >even snitch some ideas from him if I like 'em! Please do. I don't even care if you credit me; like I said, there isn't really anything original, and you can probably find any piece of it somewhere else, if you go looking. Then again, the same is pretty much true of Unix, and look where it got the people who wrote it! :-) Also, if you look at the end, you'll see that the idea was to encourage people to do what you're doing. For another source of ideas, you might look at ZING!, which is a CLI replacement from the other direction. Instead of adding lotsa things to the CLI to make it use the hardware on the machine, you add features to the workbench to make it useable as a mouse-driven CLI. "The easiest way to get software written is to get someone else to write it for you." - Erik Fair