Software engineer Ajitem Sahasrabuddhe recently wrote a 6-post series called “Iron Core” about airline ticketing infrastructure. The entire series is probably too software engineer-y for us, but the third part has some interesting info about a particular 1960s user interface called “cryptic mode”:

Cryptic mode was born from a hard constraint: teletype terminals in the 1960s billed by the character transmitted. Every keystroke cost money. A command that took 50 characters instead of 10 cost five times as much. Commands were compressed to the absolute minimum.

The result is a domain-specific language whose syntax was shaped entirely by economics. AN for Availability Next. SS for Sell Segment. NM for Name. ER for End and Retrieve. No vowels wasted. No words spelled out.

Apparently the official name is “native mode,” but it gained its nickname because… well, see for yourself.

Asking the system for “Availability for Next flight” for February 8, from Nagpur to Delhi, is just 13 characters:

AN08FEBNAGDEL

And the system responds in an equally mysterious way:

** AMADEUS AVAILABILITY - AN ** NAG DEL SU 08FEB 0000
1 AI 416 Z9 C9 D9 Y9 B9 NAG DEL 0840 1030 32A 0
2 AI 416 M9 H9 K9 Q9 T9 NAG DEL 0840 1030 32A 0
3 6E 5317 S9 T9 W9 V9 Q9 NAG DEL 0840 0755 32A 0

With time these commands became wrapped inside more approachable interfaces and GUIs. But they exist under the hood and…

Many experienced travel agents still use it today alongside, and sometimes instead of, web-based agent interfaces such as Amadeus Selling Platform Connect. For a trained operator working a booking-heavy workflow, it is faster than the equivalent graphical interface for the same sequence of operations.

Except today, you get to choose. At the beginning, when “online” didn’t imply internet, and registration computers looked like this, you didn’t have a choice: this was the language you had to fluently write and read.

It makes Unix commands, also intentionally short/​cryptic, look like Microsoft Bob.

An 8-minute video by Bread on Penguins about some fun uses of terminal:

I am pretty sure this is nothing new for heavy command-line gurus (and heavy Raycast users, and so on), but I found it delightful to see someone so excited about creative uses of the terminal, and it made me realize how much time I do waste going through the browser, then Google Search, then scrolling. I am sure tightening some of these loops would feel great.

There is also something interesting in the argument about terminal being the ultimate “reading mode” of any website, chiefly because it cannot be anything else.

Mostly, this and Strudel before make me excited to see some new (to me) stuff happening with text-based user interfaces.

I’m slightly suspicious of this story (and the video inside) that Unix commands were made so short (cp instead of copy, mv instead of move, ls instead of list, and so on) because the console keyboard had really unpleasant keys.

I imagine it must be a confluence of many things, not just this one. Shorter means faster even with amazing keyboards. Shorter also means the commands travel quicker over the slow modems of the era. The downsides were limited: the early nerdy user base of Unix could handle the extra confusion.

On the other hand – no pun intended – I typed on the keyboard on the picture and I can confirm it is absolutely, positively atrocious, with the tallest keys you have possibly seen:

At any rate, it’s a good a reminder of the power of motor memory, and the difficulty of change management. Even the worst keyboards imaginable are so much better now, and the modems so much faster. And yet, the short and confusing commands remain to this day.