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by kragen 411 days ago
Do you have any clues about which DEC system it might be drawing these other elements from? I mean specifically:

- FCBs.

- A command interpreter prompt ending in ">" rather than "*" or ".".

- 8-character filenames (rather than 6).

- ASCII filenames (rather than RADIX-50).

- Drive letters.

- PIP switches in square brackets rather than introduced by slashes. (Some TENEX programs evidently enclosed their switches in parentheses, but the ones I've seen so far don't use square brackets.)

- Launching programs from the command interpreter with command-line arguments, like Unix.

Maybe Kildall thought all these things up himself, but I suspect some previous DEC OS was their origin. But it isn't RT-11, TENEX, the DEC 10/50 monitor, TOPS-20, or VMS.

I want to emphasize I'm not claiming that these are advances or innovations. I'm just saying that they suggest some other influence.