16 Sep
2019
16 Sep
'19
9:29 a.m.
The first Unix I used was PC/ix on an XT. I don’t know it even had vi, but it had INed,
which I assume was the ISC evolution of NED & Rand Editor. (I think I first started
using vi on Xenix on an AT before I got my own RT??)
Anyway, I had been very productive with half-duplex editing on 3270 on CMS up to that
point, and INed seemed very natural to me.
Totally unrelated to Unix, when I came to IBM Austin from Yorktown, real 3270s were
scarce/shared. I got a DisplayWriter with a 3270 card and emulator in my office. That was
better than a real 3270 to my tastes, even with the 8” diskettes. 3270 emulation on PC was
ok, but not as good as the real thing, certainly not as good as the DW emulation.
On Sep 15, 2019, at 9:37 PM, Bakul Shah
<bakul(a)bitblocks.com> wrote:
On Mon, 16 Sep 2019 12:05:24 +1000 George Michaelson <ggm(a)algebras.org> wrote:
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The "block copy in an editor" thing is
something which has intrigued
me for years. poor old ed/ex/vi just couldn't do it, and for the life
of me, I could not understand why this was "deprecated" by the people
writing that family of editors. I seem to recall the various
lightweight emacs which proceeded GNU had it, in some cases, and GNU
had it. (Goslings emacs?)
I think this is because vi grew out of ex which grew out of
ed, all of which were "line" editors, while the Rand Editor
(and the original NED) assumed a quarter plane model. e had
commands such as box (to draw a box), blank (or was it cut?)
to wipe out all nonblank chars from a rectangle, replace,
overlay (nonblank chars from the copy buffer overwrote data),
underlay (nonblank chars from the copy buffer didn't overwrite
nonblank chars) and so on. It even had justfy, fill and center
commands. It was basically an editor for producing documents
in monspaced fonts!