History
Tab completion showed up early in computing history; one of the first examples appeared in the Berkeley Timesharing System for the SDS 940, where if a typed string were ambiguous, the interpreter would do nothing, but if the string was not ambiguous, it would automatically complete it without any command from the user. This feature did not work well with the all too frequent typos, and so was a mixed blessing. This feature was imitated by Tenex's developers who made an important change: Tenex used "escape recognition", in which the interpreter would not attempt to autocomplete unless the escape key was struck (thus the name) by the user. The domain was also expanded from only program names on the Berkeley system to both program names and files on Tenex. Tenex implemented command line completion using the Macro-20 assembler call COMND JSYS which fully described the interaction and implementation. From there it was borrowed by Unix.
Read more about this topic: Command-line Completion
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)