At the Stanford Information Systems Lab while I was there 1976-81, we had a series of
PDP-11s. The first one I remember was an 11/34 running V6 and later V7. It was later
upgraded to, I think a /45 and finally a /70.
At first everyone used ed, then Prof. John Gill hacked it to add a command, I think ‘%’
that was the equivalent of .-10,.+10p which on our 9600 baud Hazeltine’s was a glimpse of
the future.
At some point we got ex/vi, but before that we got the “Rand Editor” re, which was a
perfectly
functional screen editor, if you squinted a bit.
Does anyone here know the place of re in the history?
Later, Gill went off for a sabbatical at Yorktown Heights and came back to complain about
having
to use SOS on the mainframe. He reported, however, that global search and replace was
very fast.
-L
Also a few years later I got Dave Conroy’s version of microemacs. I complained about the
key bindings and he told me to use the “change configuration” command, or cc.