Well... at that time, paper terminals were still in use in some places. The gap between legacy and modern hardware that was in operation was huge.

I think what's recent is the syntax for mixing short and long options together on the same command. Some commands had long options, some had short, but with "--" one command can have both.

Pretty sure some programs used them before 1990, just not with a convenient getopt_long(). I know it's not the best example, but 'dd' used things like "if=whatever skip=123" prior to 1990. The article also mentions find, but it used single dash long options.

Found an example that's a bit closer, from Minix 1.0, 1987. The "pr" program:

  Usage: pr [+page] [-columns] [-h header] [-w with] [-l length] [-nt] [files]

Mixed in this case, with -columns and +page, and all hand parsed. But long options nonetheless.

Isn't that expecting say pr +4 -172

to format for printing starting at page 4, on a wide 172 colunn paper?

Ah, yes, you're right...

I think the "find" command was around before then, and it has long options. For example:

    find dir -type f -name "*.h" -print

Those aren't really options. The syntax of the find command is

  find <options> <paths> <expression>

Those thing you list are part of the <expression> part of the command. The <options> part in BSD find, and I believe GNU find, only uses options of the form -X where X is a single character.

It's a little confusing because the man pages for both BSD and GNU find do call some of the things that appear in the <expression> part of the command "options".

Find is specifically called out in the article.

> There were a few programs that ran on Unix systems and used long option names starting with either - or no prefix at all, such as find, but those syntaxes were not compatible with Unix getopt() and were parsed by ad-hoc code.