On 2026-04-10 20:11, Alexis wrote:
In 1976, Version 6 Unix ran on PDP-11s whose bus width ranged from 16 to 22 bits; 22 bits allows directly addressing at most 512k of memory. The Thompson shell was designed to be small to maximise the space available for the programs it was running.That would explain it. Once I was whining to Bart about zsh's terseness and he explained that back in the day, one conserved every possible keystroke.
Ain't it the truth? Me, I'm a compatibility Nazi -- do the right thing and damn the torpedoes. Older versions are always there in any case.... And then a few weeks later I had a user population of about a dozen, most of them friends, and I didn't want to screw up my embedded base. The rest, sadly, is history.
Thanks Alexis