10 Jan
2020
10 Jan
'20
10:04 p.m.
On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 10:39 AM Nemo Nusquam <cym224(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Intrigued, I asked her what the editor was. She did
not know
and pointed to her cheat-sheet listing editor commands. One was ^X^C to
exit-and-send. She is not a programmer and I was a bit surprised at
their choice.
Similar fun Unix/ITS emacs story.
In the mid/later 1970s, my least techie sister Cynthia was/is a concert
harpist with a degree from Oberlin's conservatory. She can type extremely
fast as she has super manual dexterity. But playing the harp is not
something that paid a great deal or offered her 'regular' gigs, so to make
the monthly rent she got a job working at MIT as Ron Rivest's admin . She
typed all the RSA papers in emacs and tex on one of the MIT systems. She
did not know any better, that's what they gave her/taught her. When she
later would look for a job at other places and they would ask her, 'do you
know how to use a Wang System' and she would say: "No, I know emacs" [for
the younger set, longer before MS-Word, "Wang" was synonymous with "word
processor" and many/most commercial offices had a 'Wang unit" for the
folks
doing the typing.].
[As a side note when she found out the elevators were hacked and
controlled by the student's different computers, she stopped using them and
would take the stairs in Tech Sq].