TECO - The text editor from hell (on which Emacs was based on)
1–10 of 14 posts
Re: TECO - The text editor from hell (on which Emacs was based on)
#2Well, Ed is the standard text editor...
(for those not in the know -- http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html)
Re: TECO - The text editor from hell (on which Emacs was based on)
#3If someone cites some of your programming work 50 years after you finished working on it then you must have done something right.
From what I have heard from my father and others, editing punch cards was hell itself. The fact that TECO managed to bridge the punch card and hard disk storage eras could be viewed as some sort of miracle.
On another note, it it seems that Dan Murphy, who created TECO at DEC in 1962 - 1963, is still going strong. In 2009 The IEEE Annals of Computing History published this article authored by him (warning: pdf): http://tenex.opost.com/anhc-31-4-anec.pdf and earlier this year he updated his personal website: http://www.opost.com/dlm/
Re: TECO - The text editor from hell (on which Emacs was based on)
#4wow, archeoware... put it on github pls!
Re: TECO - The text editor from hell (on which Emacs was based on)
#5don't think it would be popular
Re: TECO - The text editor from hell (on which Emacs was based on)
#6Well, 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.
Re: TECO - The text editor from hell (on which Emacs was based on)
#7> ... on which Emacs was based on ...
In grammar, this is like wearing both suspenders and a belt.
Re: TECO - The text editor from hell (on which Emacs was based on)
#8There'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 coming along well, and I'm learning TECO?
I'm coming back to it later, though, because it's a fun salute to a great guy, and because using a punch-card-oriented editor for any task today would amuse me immensely.
Re: TECO - The text editor from hell (on which Emacs was based on)
#9Compared to the alternatives at the time, TECO was great for programming on the PDP-10 using a Datapoint video display terminal (text mode only). Michael Yoder, Putnam Fellow 1971 and 1972, wrote a Turing machine in TECO back then.
Re: TECO - The text editor from hell (on which Emacs was based on)
#10There is a BSD port for TECO as well. I'm running it on a PPC Mac via Macports.