On: Newly discovered earliest draft of a Unix manual (...

[AndyMcConachie]

> Commands need not be on different lines; instead they may be separated by semicolons.

Is that a joke?

[coldtea → AndyMcConachie]

What part of it sounds like a joke? That's how it is today too, but it wasn't the case at the time for all environments.

[AndyMcConachie → coldtea]

The use of a semicolon in the preceding sentence is what I thought might be the joke. Read the sentence again, Dennis's use of a semicolon is a rather strange way to punctuate the sentence.