On Tue, 31 Aug 2010, Daniel Taylor wrote: > Before there was vi there were ed (the line editor) and sed (the stream > editor). > > In the days of paper terminals ed was the ultimate interactive text > editor, you could (in theory) write your thesis using it. I remember the paper terminals at WPI in 1976. There was a program, possibly ed, that allowed us to type a line and then see what we had typed. Or maybe we would type, but when we used backspace we wouldn't really see the effect (was that when we saw ^H^H on the screen?) but we could see the line later to check that it was correct. Maybe that was ed. Anyway, I hadn't thought of it before, but as you point out, when you're using that kind of interface, you can't use a normal modern-day editor. So that's why they call them "screen editors". So that was all we had when I was a freshman -- paper terminals that you couldn't get on unless you were willing to stay up all night. Now my son is a freshman and he has a laptop with 4GB RAM hooked up to a 25" 1080p HDTV. That laptop probably has much more than 100 times the total computing power at WPI in 1976. I think this has gone better than I expected, but I can't really remember what I expected. I do remember people talking about computer-brain hook-ups so that you would control a computer with your "mind." I think we were supposed to have that about 10 years ago. AI didn't go as well as they thought it would. > sed was (and perhaps still is) the ultimate non-interactive text editor. I used to use it, but then started using perl for all the functions previously handled for me by sed. Mike