[TUHS] Old screen editors

[Rob Pike]

Be careful, those early multiplexer attempts by Chesson were very
buggy. I bounced off them pretty hard, and greg and I had long
debugging sessions trying to get ur-Jerq up reliably on them. The
pains were one component of dmr proposing streams* as another model.

I was using the v7 ones; the v6 ones must be even buggier.

-rob

* Or as USG later dubbed them, STREAMS.

On Tue, Mar 29, 2022 at 9:40 PM Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
>
>    > 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.