[HECnet] VT-62?

[Dave McGuire]

On 10/02/2013 03:03 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
      EDT is pure heaven.


Dave this comment made me laugh.

  :-)

When I was at a start up in the early 1980s and had so many ex-DEC
folks, the ex-VMS engineers in both HW and SW started to b*tch:   "EDT
was best/heaven etc.." I've forgotten all the things people called it.   
I think it was Teixiera that took an EDT editor manual that one of them
had and sat with one of the ex-VT-100 designers in his office and wrote
some e-lisp for him.   The result was an EDT emulation on top of
Gosling's Emacs (pre-cursor to gnu emacs).     Those macro's got moved to
Zimmerman Emacs.   In fact, if you look today in the GNU Emacs manual,
you'll still find these words in the emulation section:

EDT (DEC VMS editor)
      Turn on EDT emulation with M-x edt-emulation-on; restore normal
      command bindings with M-x edt-emulation-off.

      But what was interesting to me to watch over time the ex-VMS folks
      take one of three directions even with the having "Emacs-EDT" available:

      1.) switch to a native emacs 'cause they found it more powerful than
      EDT /(i.e./ learn now emacs could be "bound" to UNIX and discovered
      they liked it).

      2.) switch to vi because it ran on everything (from a PC to Cray and
      in between inc VAX/VMS) which in those days emacs did not [this is
      what I did and never looked back]

      3.) a one guy refused it all and spent a couple of weeks writing a
      teco clone (which you can still download from his web site).     I
      used to think that was pretty close to the original for those us
      that learned teco on the PDP-10's years ago - but by that time, I
      was fully vi literate so why both going back.

  I'm an emacs guy; I live in emacs most every day.   I remember the
first time I tried the EDT emulation mode.   It seemed so very right and
yet so very wrong, at the same time. :-)

In the end its all about choice and what makes you comfortable.

  Of course.   As long as it's emacs! B-)

I'm
jaded enough to realize that all the editors from those times are
similar and all can do cool things when they ran on "glass ttys" - it's
just what you learned and have burned into the ROMs in your fingers AND
how well the editor is integrated into the native system.   I learned
IBM/TSS on a ASR 33 with a line editor, I bet it you tossed that too me
now I would scream.       If I had a 10 again, I wonder what I would use,
as I know at this stage, I've forgotten teco.     For VMS I think these
days I would just use vi and be done with it.   There is something to be
said for an editor that just works.

That said, the folks that wrote vim changed it just slightly from vi
[they "fixed it" of course] and when I try editing on a my Mac or a
Linux box it sometimes drives me nuts as I can not reprogram those
fingers at my age.

  I'm right there with you.   Emacs since v18.   Good stuff.   But my
fingers still remember and adore EDT whenever I'm on a PDP-11 or a VAX.

                        -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA