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Friday, 16. February 2007
Discovering TOPS-20
rsbohn
07:55h
I was reading Eric Raymond and realized that I didn't really know anything about TOPS operating systems. After reading about it on Wikipedia I was able to create an account at twenex.org and try it out. For an archaic operating system it does have some interesting features. Using ^Q to page through the text output seems very primitive. But the command completion and help system are similar to Cisco IOS and other router/embedded systems I have used. The commands and device names (SYS: for example) remind me of MSDOS. It is interesting to see where all of these non-unix ideas came from. And they even have a version of emacs... I'm using the Microsoft Powershell now, and one thing I like is that you can create new 'drives' with the new-psdrive command. You aren't restricted to drive letters. You get an ENV: drive for the environment variables (almost like plan9?). I'm building scripts to work with a SNIPS: drive for an online notetaking system. I could just work with the raw paths, but the drive names help provide context. When I'm in the SNIPS: drive I know I'm working with snips. When I'm in the HKLM: drive then I'm working with registry keys (something I was never quite able to get working from jscript). That I can't run external commands (like say notepad.exe) on the psdrive paths is annoying, but for now I'll just have to work around it. I do like that I can pipe things into clip.exe and the paste them wherever I need to. Powerscript is changing the way I do my job.
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8143 days of detection
mod: 12/3/08, 5:42 AM days of detection... PMOG owner
BiographyRandall Bohn lives in Orem, Utah, USA. He works as a Software Quality Engineer. He is a big fan of the AVR line of microcontrollers. He has been in the computer industry since 1989. Randall is married and has three children. rsbohn can be reached via gmail.com. status
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