▲ | rootbear 6 days ago | |
All I can think of is that it was a way to look at the end of a long program which wouldn't all fit on a display. Predating, I suppose, the 'tail' program, or whatever the DECSYSTEM 20 equivalent was. | ||
▲ | leoc 6 days ago | parent [-] | |
I assume that it would be clearly useful if your terminal was a slow paper teleprinter. Once you got used to reading listings with the lines in reverse order, which shouldn't really be very difficult, LISTREVERSE would let you start reading from wherever you had got up to in your partly-completed listing, then cancel whenever you'd got enough context, instead of having to guess in advance how far up the program you'd want to look. You could even then print out the same range of lines again unreversed, if you wanted. |