RTE

On 9 Jan 2007 at 12:39, Jay West wrote: I suspected as much! Fair enough, but you must have examples that provoked that reaction. Such as typing "awk" to invoke your string manipulator? :-) I'll mention two things I found non-intuitive with RTE (I'm speaking of the early RTEs, not the later ones that grafted on Unix commands verbatim). First, there's no default command interpreter. When you boot RTE, it says, "SET TIME," and then it just sits there with no prompt (rather like logging into TSB; I always found the lack of a command prompt disturbing). Second, when you finally learn that you have to "interrupt the system" (from doing what?) in order to get a prompt to enter a command, you find that there are no commands that deal with files. None. RTE has a file management package and associated command interpreter, but it's run as one of many user programs. Once you get the file manager running, though, you have a prompt and the usual assortment of file-manipulation commands (list directories, copy files, edit, compile, etc.). At least the command names are mnemonic, rather than whimsical. :-) Actually, I was interested in your comment because I wondered whether RTE seemed odd to you compared to _current_ operating systems, or whether it seemed odd in the context of systems of the 1970s. -- Dave