17 Jun
2025
17 Jun
'25
3:40 p.m.
Somebody (ISC I >>think<<) inserted some of the code for INed into the ROMs
of the Perkin-Elmer Fox terminals to provide some assistance (which were
6800-based). I never knew much about it, but it was the system the 68000
folks (Les Crudele, Nich Trudenick et al) used during core development. It
all ran on a PDP-11/70, which was running Interactive's V6 port that their
group controlled in the back, basically unnoticed. Les told me that the
system was pretty responsive, even with the load they put on it of
editing and text processing, much more responsive than the resources
Motorola corporate offered them. This was all important because the 6809
was the "corporate" project and what would become the 68000 was purely an
unamed skunkworks project, basically hidden away from the core management
structure as an experiment/bet that they could do it (a story told
elsewhere and while UNIX rely on the results, was not part of UNIX's story
directly other than a PDP-11/70 running UNIX was the system was used to
create the processor).
On Tue, Jun 17, 2025 at 11:06 AM John R Levine <johnl(a)taugh.com> wrote:
On Tue, 17 Jun 2025, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
Yes. The same people went from Yale to RAND and then started Interactive.
INed may have used code from the RAND editor, even if not, it was written
by the same guy and worked much the same.
> At
Yale we had one called "e" that ran on our early bitmap terminals.
Wasn't this related (somehow) to what was called the RAND editor? I remember using "e" on IS/1, a V6
derivative on the PDP-11, in
the 1980-81 time frame. I don't know if it was hardwired for a
particular terminal or not.
Interactive sold OEM terminals but I don't recall whether the editor also
worked on other devices.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl(a)taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
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