Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!madd
From: madd@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Jim Frost)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: More John Dvorak comments
Message-ID: <24716@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 3 Sep 88 00:10:15 GMT
References: <18509@neabbs.UUCP> <24516@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <31930@clyde.ATT.COM> <6414@chinet.UUCP> <9837@bellcore.bellcore.com> <1028@mtund.ATT.COM> <1185@plx.UUCP> <5373@killer.DALLAS.TX.US>
Reply-To: madd@bu-it.bu.edu (Jim Frost)
Followup-To: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Organization: Boston University Distributed Systems Group
Lines: 50

With regards to the crypticness of UNIX over MS-DOS, I have to stress
that neither is more cryptic but UNIX is certainly more consistent.

Consider that the most commonly used DOS commands are "dir", "copy",
"erase", "mkdir", "rmdir", and "chdir".  Of these, the latter are
identical on both systems (except for the "md" and "rd" abbreviations
in MS-DOS) so we can throw them out.

UNIX counterparts are "ls", "cp", and "rm".  For LiSt, CoPy, and
ReMove.  The first and third letter of each command.  Simple once you
know it and "list" makes more sense than "directory" to most of the
beginners that I've dealt with.  You might note that the "first and
third" rule is consistent amoung a LOT of other UNIX commands, but
most users never touch them.

For more exaustive commands, MS-DOS gets worse exponentially while
UNIX is fairly consistent amoung the standard commands.  Want to copy a
whole directory tree?  "cp -r".  Remove one?  "rm -r".  Under MS-DOS
the functions are "xcopy /s" and "not available on the base system".
UNIX has lots more options, but if you don't use them it doesn't
matter if they're there or not.

Once a user gets advanced enough to play with wildcards, MS-DOS just
looses it.  It took me awhile to figure out that cp *1.bat would
ignore the 1 altogether, which is counterintuitive at best.  Add to it
the fact that few MS-DOS programs actually accept wildcards and what
you have is a mess.

Now I have to give MS-DOS some points for simplicity overall, but not
many considering its lack of power.  Almost anybody can figure out
"CHKDSK", while I've been daunted by "fsck"'s output more than once.
Considering that the basic user should never have to deal with fsck,
though, this is not a serious problem.

I think the only people that have a valid complaint are those who must
use both systems, as I do.  Since several of the MS-DOS commands are
UNIX-ish, sometimes this leads to confusion.  It would have been nicer
if they'd either followed the format or thrown it away completely.

Before I go, Bell Labs conducted a test to see if varying the user
interface changed anything.  It had (at least) three cases:  mnemonic
commands, nonsense commands, and mixed up mnemonics (mnemonic commands
that did things other than what was obvious, like "cp" meaning "rm").
The learning curves were virtually identical.  Of course if you'd
watched secretaries learn IBM System/36 OCL and also learn MS-DOS,
you'd have seen it yourself -- I have, and it took about the same
amount of banging it into their heads before they got the idea.

jim frost
madd@bu-it.bu.edu