[NBLUG/talk] The Debian Way

[Walter Hansen]

I'm not sure, you could have me. It was probably about 1982 and i was
programming in pascal on the CYBER-40 (water cooled) at Sonoma State
University. You would enter a command to list a range of lines or a single
line. I'm pretty sure if you wanted to edit a line you had to retype that
line.

Later on I ended up doing a bunch of stuff on the PDP-11. I think you can
buy a PDP-11 on ebay for about $100 now. There was an cool old System
Administrator there who gave me and my friends a tour. He showed us his
screen would do all sorts of ASCII cartoons like Andy Capp.

He had a line printer that was about 8'x8'x5'. It had this large barrel
and each segment had all characters around it. The segments turned
independently. So for each line of printing the segments would rotate to
the proper character and then the whole barrel would strike the paper. A
little like a daisy wheel on steroids. It would spew forth printouts at a
speed I've yet to see matched. Users from all over campus would print on
it and he'd leave the jobs in little slots in the wall for them.

His disk drives looked like washing machines. There were large cartridges
which held ten or twenty platters of disks and you would put them into the
drive and lock them in place.

My friends played too much eliza. I found an Apple ][ down the hall and
monopolized that.

Somewhere I still have printouts from that line printer and probably some
notes on useful commands. I assume it must have been a flavor of unix, but
I really don't know.

> On Fri, 28 Oct 2005, Walter Hansen wrote:
>
>> Yes, yes, fighting words, I know. I'll probably even learn emacs when I
>> get a chance. In my view a text editor should primarily be easy to use
>> and
>> focus on editing text. Simple enough to do most normal things without
>> the
>> help of a manual. When vi came along I'm sure it was simple, after all
>> it
>> was replacing things like edline (pain in the ass to program with). But
>> since that time (1975?) a lot of easier to use text editors have come
>> along. But vi remains on every *ix system as a tribute to our geekyness.
>> Why not edline? It's even more geeky. I think vi was probably the first
>> really usable text editor on *ix systems and everyone collectively
>> heaved
>> a sigh of relief and said "I guess that will do" and nobody has had
>> enough
>> motivation to replace it with something better.
>
> just a nit, but i never heard of edline, but MicroSoft had a similiarly
> named line editor called edlin (which could arguably be said to be more
> user-friendly than the minimalistic unix line editor ed.
>
> i'm not sure the predecessor of ed or even if there is one, but you have
> to use ed when things get really out of hand and you can't load anything
> more advanced.  ed is small, still only 35,912 bytes in Solaris 10 while
> gnu ed is 47,252 bytes.   ed assumes you know what you're doing so doesn't
> even give you a prompt.   it isn't smaller but restricted ed or red is
> restricted to working on files in the current directory.
>
> the Sun man page starts "The ed utility is the standard  text  editor."
>
>
> enhanced ed is ex, and it still exists inside vi.  in fact when you type
> : and a command, you're talking to ex.  ex is bigger,  all of 240,264
> bytes
> in Solaris 10 and is a hard link to vi, and on a linux box here, gnu ex
> is a symbolic link to vi, which is 474,800 bytes.  ex, like ed (and edlin
> for that matter) are line editors.  vi is a screen editor, so curses is
> used so you can display a window of lines into the edit buffer (the edit
> buffer exists in line editors as well) and move the cursor withing the
> edit window.
>
>
> however, every linux box i've seen doesn't run vi when you type the
> command vi.  it runs vim which has gotten a lot of doodads that may help
> for certain work, but can no longer be logically included in /bin
> (in spite of many people running linux like a dos box with one large
> partition), and had to be moved to /usr/bin as it's 2,044,536 bytes.
> well, to be fair disk space is now plentiful, and single-user workstations
> are different animals than time-sharing systems, but i still find it
> more comfortable to separate /, /bin, /usr, /usr/local, /home (or
> /export/home), var and tmp.   and while the newer bit-map window systems
> are interesting to look at, i get more done with CDE.
>
> -ron
>
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