It examines the issue of GUIs vs. command line interfaces, among other things.
I'm pretty sure there is an anecdote there that says that Mac OS did have a hidden command line? It was only for Apple engineers, not for end users, but it was there. I'd appreciate a pointer if anyone remembers.
MPW had an interesting way to ease GUI-centric users into its CLI-centric world. There was a mode you could trigger for commands that brought up a help-oriented GUI for the command to build the command argument list, which would then echo onto the command line. Depending upon who built the GUI, it was usually a less terse and friendlier help for new users than AIX's SMIT, for those who are familiar with that.
I sometimes wish there was an open source equivalent like that for Linux , but with live, interactive building of the command as the GUI options were manipulated so new users could get a feel for commands more readily. This would act as an intermediate help system for casual users that is friendlier than manpages, and more immediate than searching around the Net.
> There was a mode you could trigger for commands that brought up a help-oriented GUI for the command to build the command argument list, which would then echo onto the command line.
This still lives on in a sense. For example, in VSCode, many UI commands translate to executing shell code in its internal terminal (and you can see both the commands and the output).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co...
It examines the issue of GUIs vs. command line interfaces, among other things.
I'm pretty sure there is an anecdote there that says that Mac OS did have a hidden command line? It was only for Apple engineers, not for end users, but it was there. I'd appreciate a pointer if anyone remembers.