Moving to a COFF On Wed, Nov 13, 2019 at 4:16 AM Thomas Paulsen <thomas.paulsen(a)firemail.de> wrote: TECO started as that for PDP-1 or maybe TX-1 (at MIT I believe). But over time, TECO became the primary text editor on the PDP-10's for many, many people in the ARPA community. I learned it as my second, PDP-10 text editor (I learned a line editor, who's name I forget, that was similar to the IBM's editor when I got my first PDP-10 account, but quickly moved to TECO). FWIW: The original EMACS was a set of TECO macros. The historical truth is that besides being the primary text editor, it was so rich in function that TECO became for the PDP-10 what Jon Bentley describes as a 'little language' and was used for all sorts of small hacks. The later Unix world created other tools, be it sed, later awk, and the like. But for the PDP-10 world, TECO very much that low level engine that a lot of people used. When BLISS was written, CMU did not have UNIX (and thus nor any of the UNIX tools - as I had a small hand in making UNIX happen @ CMU in the early 1970s). But when I arrived, the two PDP-10's (CMU-A and CMU-B) reigned supreme as primary CS (and EE) systems, along with the CMU hacked version of IBM's TSS running on the 360 for everyone else (and where I got my first real programming job), plus CMU's own TSS/8 on couple of PDP-8s that were scattered about. FWIW: Chuck used the PDP-10's for his work as a grad student. He also is famous for being the first PhD to produce his thesis on a 'laser printer', the CMU XGP (it was not a laser as today, it was modified FAX machine made by Xerox). The fun story is that CMU's administration would not accept his thesis originally because the library wanted the 'originals' to put in the archives. It took 6-9 months for his thesis advisor (Bill Wulf) to convince the library, that they had the originals. Anyway, the use of TECO in such a manner was very much the way things were done in those days, so the legend is very much possible.