[HECnet] VT-62?

[Clem Cole]

On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 12:43 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> 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.

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

Clem