On 13 April 2017 at 21:35, Adam Sampson <ats@offog.org> wrote:

Steve Mynott <steve.mynott@gmail.com> writes:

> In the autumn of 1984 as an undergrad at Durham University [...] a
> strange line editor [...] it seemed to resemble ex. I think I was
> told it was written in the UK [...]

ECCE, maybe? This originated at Edinburgh in the late 60s and was ported
to all sorts of languages and platforms. See the DCS archive for many
versions (including several Unix ports with mid-80s dates) and manuals:

I vaguely remember hearing of ecce, I think; however many British universities in the 1980s that I knew (largely from the student-hacker community) ran the children of an editor called GEORGE descended from an old ICL operating system:

- http://www.icl1900.co.uk/g3/editor.html (user doc)

- http://sw.ccs.bcs.org/CCs/g3/LeedsDoc/sect-e.htm (manual)

- http://sw.ccs.bcs.org/CCs/g3/ (source)

The variant at UCL was called "gedit" and hosted on OS/4000 (https://dropsafe.crypticide.com/article/3197)

The variant at Aberystwyth was called "ge" and hosted on GECOS-3 and various Unixen

There were many others; having infected (?) the UK community in the 1970s (?) it became a favourite.

-a

ps: as a friend likes to point out, OS/4000, as a B2-secure (ha) military-grade operating system, had some fabulous syntax. The equivalent to Unix's "rm -rf ~" would be:

"FCOPY USER SINK TRACE DESTROY"

...which basically implemented a recursive "mv" to /dev/null, directories included.

http://dropsafe.crypticide.com/aboutalecm