Annotated Unix Magic Poster

While many shells exist today, the original was the Bourne shell (sh), which laid the foundation for everything that followed.

The original is the Thompson shell.

I can see an AI making this mistake by ingesting a lot of text from humans making this mistake;

I can see humans making this mistake by just kinda assuming that the knowledge they’ve gained by osmosis of the timeline of various shells must be fairly complete since they haven’t heard of any earlier shell in a while, and the earliest they know of is the Bourne shell, as it’s the earliest commonly known (and has the same sh executable name on most platforms as the Thompson shell did).

The man(1) command (short for manual) is used to display online reference manuals (man pages) for commands, system calls, configuration files, and other aspects of the system.

The man(1) command displays offline reference manuals.

I don’t envision this being a common human mistake, it comes across as almost certainly an AI mistake. The AI is producing a sentence that sounds like something someone might plausibly write, and one of the words, “online” in this case, just happens to be the opposite of what would be accurate;

it probably sees the word “online” in reference to man pages in its training data a fair bit because there are places where you can read man pages online, and this will be remarked upon as a way to contrast the offline nature of how man pages usually work, like people saying, “you can find an online copy of the linux man pages at [such and such site]”.

You’ll also get people who remark on man pages being offline, as a way to contrast most documentation being online nowadays, but I guess the AI’s RNG just happened to pick “offline” in this case.