On Mon, Mar 4, 2024 at 3:27 PM Lars Brinkhoff <lars@nocrew.org> wrote:


I'd like expand on this, since I never heard about STOPGAP or SOS on the MIT PDP-6/10 computers. 
Hmm, you are undoubtedly right.  STOPGAP and SOS might just have been at DECisms.
 
I initially used SOS on the CMU PDP-10s to prep BLISS, Macro-10, and SAIL for a small job I got.  It was the most like the editor used on other job on the Computere Center's TSS system (whose name I forget, which I learned first).  I wanted to get stuff done, not learn a new editor, so that was fine.  It also worked on VMS 1.0, IIRC, as I had a job moving some BLISS-10 code to BLISS32 on the first Vax.  At some point, I was shown TECO and EMACS on the PDP-10s, but I had started to work on PDP-11 UNIX by then, and ed(1) was all that was on V5. At the time, learning something fancier for the PDP-10 seemed like a wrong time investment since I was not getting paid to work on that system, and I was getting paid to hack on UNIX. 

Truth be known, as a UNIX person, I got pretty adept with ed, so even when vi mode of ex showed up a few years later, I was actually slow to bother.

Any the CMU SOS doc I have says STOPGAP was DEC/MIT-ism but I bet that's wrong -- it was probably just DEC.

Jargon file says: SOS n.,obs. /S-O-S/ 1. An infamously {losing} text editor. Once, back in the 1960s, when a text editor was needed for the PDP-6, a hacker crufted together a {quick-and-dirty} `stopgap editor' to be used until a better one was written. Unfortunately, the old one was never really discarded when new ones (in particular, {TECO}) came along. SOS is a descendant (`Son of Stopgap') of that editor, and many PDP-10 users gained the dubious pleasure of its acquaintance. Since then other programs similar in style to SOS have been written, notably the early font editor BILOS /bye'lohs/, the Brother-In-Law Of Stopgap (the alternate expansion `Bastard Issue, Loins of Stopgap' has been proposed). 2. /sos/ n. To decrease; inverse of {AOS}, from the PDP-10 instruction set.


 
TECO was ported over to the 6 only a few weeks after delivers, and that seems to have been the major editor ever since.
Did you think of the SAIL PDP-6?
Maybe. I don't know.
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