Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2005 10:47:07 +0200 From: Danny Braniss <danny@cs.huji.ac.il> To: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, "M. Warner Losh" <imp@bsdimp.com>, kline@tao.thought.org Subject: Re: nvi for serious hacking Message-ID: <E1ES9bH-00050G-I4@cs1.cs.huji.ac.il> In-Reply-To: Your message of Mon, 17 Oct 2005 22:07:22 -0400 .
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> At 1:25 PM -0600 10/17/05, M. Warner Losh wrote: > >In message: <20051017003501.GB41769@thought.org> > > Gary Kline <kline@tao.thought.org> writes: > >: vi was the first screen/cursor-based editor in computer > >: history. > > > >Are you sure about this? I was using screen oriented editors over a > >1200 baud dialup line in 1977 on a PDP-11 running RSTS/E on a Behive > >BH-100. Seems like one year from vi to being deployed at Berkeley to > >a completely different video editor being deployed on a completely > >different os in the schools that I used this in seems fast. So I did > >some digging. > > > >vi started in about 1976[1] as a project that grew out of the > >frustration taht a 200 line Pascal program was too big for the system > >to handle. These are based on recollections of Bill Joy in 1984. > > > >It appears that starting in 1972 Carl Mikkelson added screen editing > >features to TECO[2]. In 1974 Richard Stallman added macros to TECO. > >I don't know if Carl's work was the first, but it pre-dates the vi > >efforts. Other editors may have influanced Carl. Who knows. > > I arrived in RPI in 1975. In December of 1975, we were just trying > out a mainframe timesharing system called "Michigan Terminal System", > or "MTS", from the university of Michigan. The editor was called > 'edit', and was a Command Language Subsystem (CLS) in MTS. That > meant it had a command language of it's one. > > One of the sub-commands in edit was 'visual', for visual mode. It > only worked on IBM 3270-style terminals, but it was screen-based and > cursor-based. The editor would put a bunch of fields up on the > screen, some of which you could modify and some you couldn't. The > text of your file was in the fields you could type over. Once you > finished with whatever changes you wanted to make on that screen, you > would hit one of 15 or 20 interrupt-generating keys on the 3270 > terminal (12 of which were "programmable function keys", in a keypad > with a layout similar to the numeric keypad on current keyboards). > The 3270 terminal would then tell the mainframe which fields on the > screen had been modified, and what those modifications were. The > mainframe would update the file based on that info. > > I *THINK* the guy who wrote that was ... Bill Joy -- as a student at > UofM. I can't find any confirmation of that, though. The closest > I can come is the web page at http://www.jefallbright.net/node/3218 , > which is an article written by Bill. In it he mentions: > > By 1967, MTS was up and running on the newly arrived 360/67, > supporting 30 to 40 simultaneous users. ... > > By the time I arrived as an undergraduate at the University > of Michigan in 1971, MTS and Merit were successful and stable > systems. By that point, a multiprocessor system running MTS > could support a hundred simultaneous interactive users, ... > > But he doesn't happen to mention anything about editors or visual > mode. My memory of his connection to MTS's visual-mode could very > well be wrong, since I didn't come along until after visual-mode > already existed. I just remember his name coming up in later > discussions. However, I also think there was someone named Victor > who was part of the story of 3270 support in MTS. And Dave Twyver > at University of British Columbia was the guy who wrote the > 3270 DSR (Device Support Routine), as mentioned on the page at: > http://mtswiki.westwood-tech.com/mtswiki-index.php/Dave%20Twyver > > In any case, I *am* sure that MTS had a visual editor in December of > 1975, which puts before vi if vi started in 1976. Unfortunately, all > of the documentation of MTS lived in the EBCDIC world, and pretty > much disappeared when MTS did (in the late 1990's). > In my case, the first visual editor that worked under Unix was DED from the Australian Distro. it only worked on a VT100, but that's was what i had :-), then came emacs, so im one of the few that doesn't know vi. danny
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?E1ES9bH-00050G-I4>