[TUHS] Where/when did TUIs come from

[Clem Cole]

On Wed, Jun 11, 2025 at 5:46 PM Greg A. Woods <woods at robohack.ca> wrote:

>
> In the Unix world I think there were versions of full-screen editors
> well before "vi" was fully fledged.  I used one called "fred -- the
> friendly editor", initially IIRC on a PDP 11/60 running 7th Edition Unix
> at the University of Calgary, though at the time it was contemporary
> with "vi" (1980).  It was, I believe, basically also an adaptation of
> Unix "ed".  It had a modeless "open mode" controlled by the cursor keys
> allow one to move about and change text at arbitrary locations on the
> screen, though it could also be used in a more line-oriented way like
> you would expect a full-screen "ed" to work -- in this mode it still
> maintained a full screen's worth of context and one could "page" up and
> down in the document being edited but typically one inserted/appended
> lines in a modal manner, or moved or deleted or ran other commands on a
> line or block of lines at a time.
>
fred was original released for v6.  FWIW: I think it came out of Cornell. I
know we had it at CMU in 1977/78 and ran it on Perkin Elmer Fox terminals
mostly, since that is what most of the UNIX boxes we had.  I'm pretty sure
that I have the sources somewhere.   There was nothing like termcap; it was
hard-coded to the terminal being used in some manner, probably reading
something static like /etc/ttys and knowing the site's set up. But as you
said, it was small enough to run on 11/40 class UNIX systems which helpful
since 40s and 34s were what we had the most.   We did not have vi nor emacs
in UNIX-land which was still PDP-11's (EMACS was on the PDP-10s).
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