[TUHS] Un-released/internal/special UNIX versions/ports during the years?

[William Pechter]

Ron Natalie wrote:
>
> Gosling Emacs was indeed written in C.   But so is/was GNU EMACS. It 
> started by outright stealing not only one of Gosling’s earlier 
> (pre-commercial) releases but RMS made off with improvements done at 
> UNIPRESS.
>
> However, after much wrangling between James, Unipress, and RMS, RMS 
> backed out the stuff stolen from UNIPRESS and chucked out Gosling’s 
> “mocklisp” interpretter for what RMS felt was a more correct “mlisp” 
> implementation.    Of course, most of the lisp stuff was largely 
> original to RMS’s project. This accounts for the really anti-UNIX 
> ugliness in some of his keybindings that is always the thing I program 
> when I have to use a Xemacs implementation (who the hell thought using 
> BACKSPACE for “help” was a good idea?   Well I know who, his 
> maloderous self used to show up at my house from time to time).
>
> My coworkers always used to laugh at me.   If there was no EMACS-like 
> editor on the machine (I also variously used Montgomery’s EMACS and 
> finally JOVE) on smaller machines that GosMacs was too heavy for), I 
> would just use “ed” (having been a master of that from when that was 
> all there was).    I never learned vi, and if I was stuck using it, I 
> ran it in ex mode.     I had a brief stint with the RandEditor AKA 
> Interactive Systems editor derived from it (InED).
>
>
Interesting how the Rand Editor seems to have been the choice of many.
Perkin-Elmer (later Concurrent) based their in-house office automation 
software
("Paper Free in '83.") On dog-slow UniPlus SysIII (IIRC -- later MicroXelos
UniPlus SysV based I think) on 68000 cpu 8 mhz machines.  No virtual memory
a dog-crap slow video subsystem.

Of course I got a truck load of them when they dumped them and I used
them to do the two county wide newsfeed until the PC Unix stuff
became available.

http://www.1000bit.it/ad/bro/perkin/PerkinElmer7350.pdf

The nice one I had was an XF200 MicroXelos box -- which was RARE.
It was a minitower without the graphics and with room for a pair of
80mb MFM drives.

Did one of 'em for system and user accts and one for partial newsfeed.

-- 
Digital had it then.  Don't you wish you could buy it now!
pechter-at-gmail.com  http://xkcd.com/705/