On Tuesday 31 August 2010 15:14:55 Mike Miller wrote: > 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 > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list I get to do a lot of fun things for work. iXsystems in the phoenix from the ashes of BSDi, which was spun off from Berkeley after the research project involving UNIX came to a close. We have a fairly good association with Berkeley, BSD UNIX, and many of the people who were involved in it way back when. I don't rub shoulders with Bill Joy, but I do administrate billjoy.com (which is parked at the moment), and do occasionally get to run into the likes of Paul Vixie (his son worked at our office as an intern). Occasionally people ask me why UNIX commands are so terse. The original UNIX machines had 110 bps teletypes for an interface, and it didn't take much typing ability to get ahead of them. vi was a luxury that demanded a glass tty, as well as "high speed" links, that ran at a blazing 300 bps. My how times have changed (for the better) -- Thanks, Josh Paetzel -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 488 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. Url : http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20100831/dce3501d/attachment.pgp