A01JRN1@NIU.BITNET (815 John Naples 753-1875) (02/02/90)
An arcane question about MVS replies: In many places the operating system (MVS) or a utility is unsure if it should proceed or not, and so it issues a request to the console asking the operator whether or not it should proceed. The obvious response to me would be "Y" or "YES" to indicate it is okay to proceed, and "N" or "NO" to indicate the contrary. But, in many cases the acceptable responses are "U" (for yes) and "M" (for no). Does anyone know why this is the case? The only (rather silly) answer I could propose is that U/M are adjacent to Y/N on the keyboard. But I cannot accept that answer. John Naples Northern Illinois University A01JRN1@NIU
U0A61@WVNVM.BITNET (Bryan, Jerry) (02/03/90)
>When U/M are the acceptable responses, U means USE the volume >currently mounted, and M means another volume is to me MOUNTED. This is the proper derivation of the U and M, as I recall, but through custom, U came to mean yes and M came to mean no in many contexts where USE and and MOUNT really did not make sense.
NADWL@HDEDH1.BITNET (Scott Ophof) (02/04/90)
On Thu, 1 Feb 90 22:25:00 CST 815 John Naples 753-1875 said: >An arcane question about MVS replies: >... >In many places the operating system (MVS) or a utility is >unsure if it should proceed or not, and so it issues a request >to the console asking the operator whether or not it should >proceed. The obvious response to me would be "Y" or "YES" to >indicate it is okay to proceed, and "N" or "NO" to indicate the >contrary. But, in many cases the acceptable responses are >"U" (for yes) and "M" (for no). Does anyone know why this is >the case? The only (rather silly) answer I could propose is that >U/M are adjacent to Y/N on the keyboard. But I cannot accept that >answer. On some older terminals (I remember the TI 745 portable with acoustic modem), a numeric keypad was overlaid onto the alphabetic keyboard, as follows: 6 7 8 9 0 0 Y U 1 I 2 O 3 P H J 4 K 5 L 6 ; N M 7 , 8 . 9 / Could it be that this was for those people used to such an overlay? Regards. Scott/