Ask HN: How old is the CD command?

1 points by andreicek 5 years ago | 1 comment

I've been reading up on the history of the terminal and how it influenced what we have and use today and I came up with a cool question - how old are most of the commands we take for granted.

jonjacky 5 years ago |

Multics (begun 1967) preceded Unix (begun 1969) and influenced it very much. Here is a list of Multics commands:

https://multicians.org/multics-commands.html

In Multics, cwd was change_wdir, like Unix cd. There was a Multics cd command but it meant create_dir.

CTSS (begun 1961) influenced Multics, Unix and pretty much every other timesharing system. Here are some of its commands:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatible_Time-Sharing_System...

In CTSS each user had only one directory so there was no cd command. But you can see the ancestors of some other Unix commands in this list.