[COFF] COFF Digest, Vol 78, Issue 1

Mon Jul 21 07:10:07 AEST 2025

Reminds me of one of my favorite editors - wordstar 3… George R.R. Martin used it to write the great bulk of his works! We still carry around more baggage from this editor (arguably word processor) than most folks know .
Sent from my iPhone

> On Jul 20, 2025, at 1:35 PM, coff-request at tuhs.org wrote:
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> Today's Topics:
> 
>   1. Re: editor wars (Paul Winalski)
>   2. Re: editor wars (Warner Losh)
>   3. Re: editor wars (Paul Winalski)
>   4. Re: editor wars (Lars Brinkhoff)
>   5. Re: editor wars (Lars Brinkhoff)
>   6. Re: editor wars (Paul Winalski)
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2025 11:43:10 -0400
> From: Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com>
> Subject: [COFF] Re: editor wars
> To: coff at tuhs.org
> Message-ID:
>    <CABH=_VSdx+ySq5VKrRY5d-dzdVfQ1PgBh0J4A4mFS+t-R0MX1w at mail.gmail.com>
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> 
>> On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 10:02 AM Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> I remember having discussions about vi vs emacs in the mid 1990's. I'm
>> curious if those were the first public wars about editors, or if y'all
>> remember earlier flamewars on the subject?
>> 
> 
> I recall the editor flame wars going on in the Usenet and ARPAnet world
> during the 1980s.  Mainly in the Human Factors Usenet group.  Within DEC's
> software engineering groups the debate (not a flame war) was between TECO
> and EDT.
> 
> I remember one amusing (to me) incident in the vi vs. emacs flame wars.
> Jerry Pournelle, the science fiction author, was one of the early adopters
> of the home PC.  He wrote a column on PCs for Byte magazine and set himself
> up as a computer pundit.  We professional software engineers, who worked on
> "real" computers, not those feeble PC toys, held him in polite contempt.
> 
> Then came the tragic day when AOL started carrying Usenet newsgroups.  I
> say tragic because there was a major culture clash between the AOL user
> community and the Usenet community.  Usenet messages were propagated for
> the most part over low-speed dial-up connections between the various
> servers.  Terseness and brevity were therefore highly valued.  AOl, on the
> other hand, had centralized servers and, since they charged their customers
> based on connect time, encouraged verbosity and garrulous writing style.
> 
> So Pournelle got Usenet access.  His professional scientific training was
> in operations research and human factors, so it wasn't long before he
> discovered the Human Factors Usenet group.  The HF group was in the middle
> of a particularly viscous vi vs. emacs flame war at the time.  Pournelle
> stuck his nose in and posted that his editor of preference was Electric
> Pencil.  This triggered a discussion about Pournelle, along the lines of:
> "Who is this bozo?"  "He's Jerry Pournelle, the lousy SF writer who thinks
> he knows something about computers."  Both sides of the editor flame war
> dropped their differences and started flaming Pournelle.  I don't recall
> ever seeing Pournelle post on Usenet again.
> 
> -Paul W.
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> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 2
> Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2025 09:48:50 -0600
> From: Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com>
> Subject: [COFF] Re: editor wars
> To: Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com>
> Cc: coff at tuhs.org
> Message-ID:
>    <CANCZdfos=i4+U7j-nmG2qmU26r1xRV_UUbYVNkyOtusUPukSpw at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> 
>> On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 9:43 AM Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com> wrote:
>> So Pournelle got Usenet access.  His professional scientific training was in operations research and human factors, so it wasn't long before he discovered the Human Factors Usenet group.  The HF group was in the middle of a particularly viscous vi vs. emacs flame war at the time.  Pournelle stuck his nose in and posted that his editor of preference was Electric Pencil.  This triggered a discussion about Pournelle, along the lines of:  "Who is this bozo?"  "He's Jerry Pournelle, the lousy SF writer who thinks he knows something about computers."  Both sides of the editor flame war dropped their differences and started flaming Pournelle.  I don't recall ever seeing Pournelle post on Usenet again.
> 
> The more things change... You could tell the same store today about
> Discord, forums, etc.
> 
> Warner
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 3
> Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2025 14:27:42 -0400
> From: Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com>
> Subject: [COFF] Re: editor wars
> To: coff at tuhs.org
> Message-ID:
>    <CABH=_VQCSpc8+bUhi3UniXsLzj8i-CFYW7TjcA9xs7z8oNr-RQ at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
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> 
>> On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 1:52 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> Also, remember that for the early DEC PDPs 1/6/10 machines, there were
>> Stopgap, SonOfStopgap (*a.k.a.* SOS - which became DEC's EDIT), Teco, and
>> eventually EMACS [remember UNIX emacs is a clone of the original
>> TOPS-10/ITS EMACS]; and probably others that I am forgetting - those the
>> ones I used in PDP-10 days.
>> 
> 
> TECO (Text Editor and COrrector) was interesting in a couple of ways.  All
> of its commands were a single character.  It was also programmable in a
> very powerful way.  EMACS was first implemented as a set of TECO macros
> (the name EMACS is an acronym for Editor MACroS).
> 
> -Paul W.
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> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 4
> Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2025 18:29:18 +0000
> From: Lars Brinkhoff <lars at nocrew.org>
> Subject: [COFF] Re: editor wars
> To: Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com>
> Cc: Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com>, coff at tuhs.org
> Message-ID: <7wo6tepvgh.fsf at junk.nocrew.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain
> 
> Clem Cole wrote:
>> Teco, and eventually EMACS [remember UNIX emacs is a clone of the
>> original TOPS-10/ITS EMACS]
> 
> EMACS ran on ITS, TOPS-20, and TENEX, but not TOPS-10.  TOPS-10 had
> Emacs-likes FINE and AMIS.
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 5
> Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2025 18:31:38 +0000
> From: Lars Brinkhoff <lars at nocrew.org>
> Subject: [COFF] Re: editor wars
> To: Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com>
> Cc: coff at tuhs.org
> Message-ID: <7wjz42pvcl.fsf at junk.nocrew.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain
> 
> Paul Winalski writes:
>> Both sides of the editor flame war dropped their differences and
>> started flaming Pournelle.  I don't recall ever seeing Pournelle post
>> on Usenet again.
> 
> He was also kicked off ARPANET.
> http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/pourne-smut.html
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 6
> Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2025 14:35:19 -0400
> From: Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com>
> Subject: [COFF] Re: editor wars
> To: coff at tuhs.org
> Message-ID:
>    <CABH=_VSBKLYetL0Si5thu0RooOiRpWTwbJYnGDkr5fcPwM0TZw at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
>    boundary="000000000000ba9551063a609f1a"
> 
>> On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 1:52 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> So features like embedded line numbers (or not) would get into the war.
>> 
> 
> Line numbers of course were critically important in the punch card days.
> Card columns 73-80 were reserved for line sequence numbers.  Some of the
> fancier keypunches could read a card deck and put the line sequence numbers
> in for you.  A sequenced deck was a godsend if you happened to drop the
> deck on the floor.  Just put the deck in a card sorter and sort on cols.
> 73-80 and you're back in business.
> 
> In editors for non-screen terminals the line numbers provided an easy way
> to reposition the editor within the text stream.
> 
> -Paul W.
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> End of COFF Digest, Vol 78, Issue 1
> ***********************************