TECO - The text editor from hell (on which Emacs was based on) • Hacker News Board

Re: TECO - The text editor from hell (on which Emacs was based on)

#11

Post by tingletech » Sun, Aug 19, 2012, 5:54 PM UTC

mr_luc wrote: post #8

There's even a 64-bit, working distribution (with binary if you trust it) for OS X: http://almy.us/teco.html I am running it, with the list of commands open, and I have no idea how to use it but I see that it comes with a complete manual, and introduction, and a list of commands. And I had one of those "what in the world am I doing?" moments. Seriously. I have code that actually excites me that I'm writing and is com…

At work the other day someone showed me a pad of punch card keying order forms where you would fill them out and send them out to get punched. They even say "University of California Form xxxxxx" printed on the bottom of every page on the pad. He says when he stared in the 70s they had just stopped using punch cards.

Re: TECO - The text editor from hell (on which Emacs was based on)

#12

Post by tingletech » Sun, Aug 19, 2012, 5:57 PM UTC

tomjen3 wrote: post #6

jballanc wrote: post #2

Well, Ed is the standard text editor... (for those not in the know -- http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html )

Agreed. But to be fair it is still useful to fix a single issue in a huge file.

or when your machine won't boot into a display that can run vi and you need to edit some file to get the machine to boot up.

Re: TECO - The text editor from hell (on which Emacs was based on)

#13

Post by KC8ZKF » Sun, Aug 19, 2012, 9:02 PM UTC

tingletech wrote: post #11

mr_luc wrote: post #8

There's even a 64-bit, working distribution (with binary if you trust it) for OS X: http://almy.us/teco.html I am running it, with the list of commands open, and I have no idea how to use it but I see that it comes with a complete manual, and introduction, and a list of commands. And I had one of those "what in the world am I doing?" moments. Seriously. I have code that actually excites me that I'm writing and is com…

At work the other day someone showed me a pad of punch card keying order forms where you would fill them out and send them out to get punched. They even say "University of California Form xxxxxx" printed on the bottom of every page on the pad. He says when he stared in the 70s they had just stopped using punch cards.

When I went to high school the cards were sorted manually. On our first day of school we were given a stack of IBM cards, punched with our student information. We would give one to each teacher when we reported to our first class. At the end of the day, the teacher would have a stack of cards for each of her classes. All these cards were sent somewhere (my school didn't have a computer), sorted.

"DO NOT FOLD SPINDLE OR MUTILATE"

Re: TECO - The text editor from hell (on which Emacs was based on)

#14

Post by kbob » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:17 PM UTC

I am probably the only person here who learned to program in TeCO. It is indeed a Turing complete language. I'd done a few classes with Algol-60, Lisp, and PL/1, but there was an available PDP-11/05 at TMRC, and later an 11/03 at MITERS, and I started playing. A year later I'd written a significant body of code (none of which I remember at all), and flunked out of school.

Tech Model Railroad Club. Google it. MIT Electronic Research Society. Sort of a prehistoric maker space.