[ I think even back in the early days of time-sharing, connections were
faster than 50bit/s. ]
[quote]
Joy explained that the terse, single character commands and the ability to type ahead of the display were a result of the slow 300 baud modem he used when developing the software and that he wanted to be productive when the screen was painting slower than he could think
[/quote]
I believe they had 1 bit per symbol back then, so Joy really had 300 bits per second:)
I suspect that the short names were chosen rather so as to minimize the
amount of typing that humans need to do on the command line.
There was no readline nor shell history, so you had to type the full directory name each time!.
Imagine someone typing "c:\Documents And Settings\" with 300bit/sec.
They also had small CRTs and slow dot matrix printers.
Every single letter matters: open() has "O_CREAT" flag, not o_create.