I Love Ed on CP/M • Hacker News Board

Re: I Love Ed on CP/M

#21

Post by christo » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 2:46 AM UTC

hilbert42 wrote: post #19

stareatgoats wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. At the risk of being dated; it's a boon to remember the good ol' days :-)

Right :-). Things were both fun and simpler then before big boys with big money mucked it all up.

I'm sympathetic to this constant refrain (and share similar fond memories) but in general all those machines and systems are still available and usable.

Just like that Polish mechanic who was still in the 21st Century using his custom coded C64 program for wheel balancing, how many of us who pine for the good old days still wish to live in them? I argue we still in fact have that choice - don't we?

Re: I Love Ed on CP/M

#22

Post by christo » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 2:48 AM UTC

hilbert42 wrote: post #2

Surely not. Ed is diabolically horrible, it was the worst feature of CP/M. It could only be liked by someone who edits assembler in his/her head, obviously Garry Kildall fitted that mold.

Love is love. And hate of the diabolically horrible Ed is something you and I share.

Re: I Love Ed on CP/M

#23

Post by hilbert42 » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 4:27 AM UTC

314 wrote: post #6

LawrenceWoodman wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I really do love it. I've used plenty of other editors on CP/M and now that I've got used to ED I just don't find them as quick or often as powerful as ED. That doesn't mean that they don't have extra features that can be useful, but considering how little I use those extra features I think ED comes out in front for me. I think the accompanying video demonstrates quite well how easy it is to use.

You should upgrade to vi :)

"Really, they serve totally different functions."

Technically yes, but thousands of programs were written in them. I can only say that I wasn't the only one who didn't like it (and I had every reason to love it as even at home I had a fully equipped GodBout/CompuPro dual proc 8085/86 S100 system running CP/M and CP/M86 which was pretty much the king of CP/M systems. (Incidentally, I used to edit the HMXBIOS assembler code for that in WordStar in non document mode. For me it was a dream to used compared with. ED.

Even my resident assembler guru who considered any high level language you'd name too wasteful of CPU cycles, would send a file from a serial port on the CP/M machine to his Intel development system and edit it there then send it back again rather than using ED.

I've seen this dichotomy many times amongst programmers and I've come to the conclusion that it has to do with the ergonomics of the way people think and work.