Warren Toomey said: The editor was homegrown in Wollongong in 1981, as a late addition to the Interdata Unix port. I wrote it in response to an elegant and concise formal mathematical specification of a "display-oriented text editor" written by Bernard Sufrin of Oxford University's Programming Research Group. Bernard's specification was essentially an abstract model of an existing minimalist (and modeless) screen editor 'ded' developed by his colleague Richard Bornat at Queen Mary College in London. I've never seen 'ded' itself, but I expect that if you tried both editors you would see a close family resemblance. The Wollongong editor was not widely disseminated. I don't think it got into any official Unix distribution except perhaps for Edition VII - its austere minimalism could not compete with the dazzling complexity of emacs or vi. I did license it to Interdata (later aka Perkin-Elmer) for use on their own OS/32 operating system, where it was called MEDIT. I carried on for many years using it myself and porting it to various flavours of Unix, Minix, even MS/DOS, and most recently Plan 9. It was only after giving up Unix for Plan 9 that I finally switched to using Rob Pike's 'acme', which is, in its way, even more elegantly minimal. -- Richard Miller