Re: delete command weirdness

pjb@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 (Pascal J. Bourguignon) writes:

> I guess everybody became better typists with time, so we're not
> restricted to short names anymore. 

Well, that plus the fact that with more memory, you didn't have to worry
about squeezing every last byte out of the names.

IIRC the PDP-10 had (at one time) 6-bit bytes, with a word length of 36
bits, so the operating system (ITS) command names were really truncated
to only 6 characters, so they would all only take up a single machine
word.  That led to the interesting bit of trivia that you could kill all
of your running jobs by typing "massachusetts" at the command line.  It
happens to share the same 6-character prefix with "massacre".
["massacre" which was a mass version of "kill".  "kill" would kill one
 job, "massacre" all of them.]

-- 
Thomas A. Russ,  USC/Information Sciences Institute