[TUHS] Old screen editors

[Noel Chiappa]

   > From: George Michaelson

   > Teco was painful.

Some of us can recall when the _only_ choices for editing on UNIX (on the
PWB1 systems at MIT) were 'ed' and TECO!

But to add some real history (not just the usual low S/N flaming about
people's opinions of various relatively recent software, which is way too
common on this list), the guys at MIT in DSSR/RTS (the group which later did
the 68K version of PCC), who had done the port of PDP-11 TECO (in MACRO-11)
from the Delphi system at MIT (which preceded adoption of UNIX there) - a
comment in one source file alludes to Delphi, so that's where it came from, to
UNIX (I think this TECO was written there, and was not a port of a DEC one,
since it's all in lower case, and doesn't have other DEC stylisms), after the
port, added a '^R mode' similar to the one added to the PDP-10 ITS TECO and
used there to write EMACS (in TECO's usual 'line noise' code - historical
aside: at one point there was a whole 'Ivory' package for ITS TECO which could
'purify' ITS TECO code so that one copy in core [actual, real core!] could be
shared by multiple processes). That was used to write an EMACS-like package
for the PDP-11 UNIX TECO (but much simpler than real EMACS), which we used for
quite a while before Montgomery EMACS for UNIX showed up.

The full dump of the MIT-CSR PWB1 UNIX system which I retrieved has all the
sources and documentation for that TECO, and the ^R-mode code, etc. If anyone
is interested in seeing it (or maybe even playing with it, which will need
the UNIX MACRO-11), let me know, and I'll upload it.

	Noel

PS: Speaking of the full dump of the MIT-CSR PWB1 UNIX system, I was poking
around it a couple of days ago, and I found V6 'multiplexor' kernel drivers -
mpio.c and mpx.c, etc - I think thay 'fell off the back of a truck' at Bell,
like a lot of other stuff we weren't supposed to have, like the circuit design
tools, etc. I'm not sure if I have the user programs to go with them; I think
I may have found some of them for Paul Ruizendaal a while back, but the memory
has faded. Again, if interested, let me know.