[COFF] Re: editor wars

On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 10:02 AM Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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.