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emacs and other editors

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Eric Fischer

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Nov 15, 2000, 1:52:38 AM11/15/00
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Joachim Pense <joachi...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> And, finally, what is the historical relation of qed(x)/ted to the Unix zoo
> of editors (ed/ex/vi/sed...)?

What appears below looks dangerously Mentifex-like, but I assure you
it is actually supposed to represent a vi-centric family tree of editors.
Links that I can't prove but want to believe are shown as question marks.

There are undoubtedly errors and omissions, so if anyone can correct any
of these I would appreciate it.

eric

Colossal Typewriter
by John McCarthy and Roland
Silver for the PDP-1 | Photon typesetter
? | editors by Michael
? \ Barnett & Kalon
Expensive Typewriter CREATE/EDIT \ Kelley for TECO
for PDP-1 by Steve Piner for CTSS \ IBM 704 for PDP-1
/ | / | \ \__ \ by Dan Murphy
/ | / | \ \ \ |
* Expensive Typewriter editors EDITS | MEMO/MODIFY | | VEDIT |
for PDP-1, improved for by Arthur | by Leslie | | by Victor |
by Peter Deutsch PDP-4, Samuel | Lowry / | Yngve |
| PDP-5/8 for CTSS \ for CTSS / _/ for PDP-6
| ? \_ \ | / _/ CTSS TECO by
QED ? \_ \ | / / / Greenblatt,
for Berkeley SDS-940 ? \ \ | | | / Holloway,
by Deutsch and LINED TYPSET for CTSS and Nelson
Butler Lampson for PDP-6 by Jerry Saltzer ? | |
/ \ | | | ? | |
/ \ | PDP-7/9 editor | ? DEC |
QED, * QED | | ? TECO |
as published for CTSS | ????????????????|??? |
in CACM by Ken Thompson | ?? | ITS
| | | ? ED (and EDL, EDA, EDB) TECO
| | STOPGAP for CTSS / |
| QED for PDP-10 | / /
| for Multics by Bill Weiher | / |
| by Ken Thompson | edit | |
| / \ SOS for Multics | |
| / \ for PDP-10 by Charles Garman | |
| qedx QED by Steve | ___/ |
| for Multics for GCOS Savitzky | / EMACS
| by Dennis Ritchie ? edm / in TECO
| | ? for Multics / by RMS et al.
QUIDS | ? / / | |
by George Coulouris * ed ? _____/ / | |
et al. for PDP-7 Unix ? / / | |
| by Ken Thompson ? | / | |
| | ? ZED/DOC / Multics |
| | ? by Vaughan / EMACS |
| ed ? Pratt / by Bernard |
| for Unix ? in TECO / Greenberg |
| (various versions) ? | / | /
| | ? | / \ /
| | ? | / GNU Emacs
\ ed ? / /
\ for Unix v6 ? / /
\ / | \ ? / /
\ / other eds | ? / /
em (UCLA?) | ? / /
Unix ed with additions | | ? | /
from George Coulouris \ | ? | /
| | \__ | | ? | /
| | \__ | | ? | /
other | ex (v1) | /
em | Unix ed with additions / /
variants | by Bill Joy and Charles / /
DED Haley / /
by Richard Bornat, | / /
Harold Thimbleby ex (v2) / /
Unix ed with additions
by Bill Joy
|
ex/vi (v3)
extended by Mark Horton

Alan T. Bowler

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Nov 15, 2000, 3:00:00 AM11/15/00
to
Eric Fischer wrote:
>
> Joachim Pense <joachi...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > And, finally, what is the historical relation of qed(x)/ted to the Unix zoo
> > of editors (ed/ex/vi/sed...)?
>
> What appears below looks dangerously Mentifex-like, but I assure you
> it is actually supposed to represent a vi-centric family tree of editors.
> Links that I can't prove but want to believe are shown as question marks.
>
> There are undoubtedly errors and omissions, so if anyone can correct any
> of these I would appreciate it.
| ? \_ \ | / _/ CTSS TECO
by
> QED ? \_ \ | / / / Greenblatt,
> for Berkeley SDS-940 ? \ \ | | | / Holloway,
> by Deutsch and LINED TYPSET for CTSS and Nelson
> Butler Lampson for PDP-6 by Jerry Saltzer ? | |
> / \ | | | ? | |
> / \ | PDP-7/9 editor | ? DEC |
> QED, * QED | | ? TECO |
> as published for CTSS | ????????????????|??? |
> in CACM by Ken Thompson | ?? | ITS
> | | | ? ED (and EDL, EDA, EDB) TECO
> | | STOPGAP for CTSS / |
> | QED for PDP-10 | / /
> | for Multics by Bill Weiher | / |
> | by Ken Thompson | edit | |
> | / \ SOS for Multics | |
> | / \ for PDP-10 by Charles Garman | |
> | qedx QED by Steve | ___/ |
> | for Multics for GCOS Savitzky | / EMACS
> | by Dennis Ritchie ? edm / in TECO
> | / \ ? for Multics / by RMS et al.
> QUIDS / \ ? / / | |

> by George Coulouris * ed \ ? _____/ / | |
> et al. for PDP-7 Unix \ ? / / | |
> | by Ken Thompson | ? | / | |
|
FRED
for Gcos
by Peter Fraser

The Fred editor is still used with Gcos-8 today.
http://www.thinkage.ca/expl/fred/expl.html

Note that the Unix "ed", is/was considerably stripped down from
the functionality available in Gcos QED. Much of what done on
Unix with awk/sed/sh/perl was done on Gcos with QED, and now Fred.

John Ahlstrom

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Nov 15, 2000, 3:00:00 AM11/15/00
to

"Alan T. Bowler" wrote:

> Eric Fischer wrote:
> >
> > Joachim Pense <joachi...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > And, finally, what is the historical relation of qed(x)/ted to the Unix zoo
> > > of editors (ed/ex/vi/sed...)?
> >
> > What appears below looks dangerously Mentifex-like, but I assure you
> > it is actually supposed to represent a vi-centric family tree of editors.
> > Links that I can't prove but want to believe are shown as question marks.
> >
> > There are undoubtedly errors and omissions, so if anyone can correct any
> > of these I would appreciate it.

> | ? \_ \ | / _/ CTSS TECO
> by
> > QED ? \_ \ | / / / Greenblatt,
> > for Berkeley SDS-940 ? \ \ | | | / Holloway,
> > by Deutsch and LINED TYPSET for CTSS and Nelson
> > Butler Lampson for PDP-6 by Jerry Saltzer ? | |
> > / \ | | | ? | |
> > / \ | PDP-7/9 editor | ? DEC |
> > QED, * QED | | ? TECO |
> > as published for CTSS | ????????????????|??? |
> > in CACM by Ken Thompson | ?? | ITS
> > | | | ? ED (and EDL, EDA, EDB) TECO
> > | | STOPGAP for CTSS / |
> > | QED for PDP-10 | / /
> > | for Multics by Bill Weiher | / |
> > | by Ken Thompson | edit | |
> > | / \ SOS for Multics | |
> > | / \ for PDP-10 by Charles Garman | |
> > | qedx QED by Steve | ___/ |
> > | for Multics for GCOS Savitzky | / EMACS
> > | by Dennis Ritchie ? edm / in TECO

> > | / \ ? for Multics / by RMS et al.
> > QUIDS / \ ? / / | |


> > by George Coulouris * ed \ ? _____/ / | |
> > et al. for PDP-7 Unix \ ? / / | |
> > | by Ken Thompson | ? | / | |
> |

> FRED
> for Gcos
> by Peter Fraser

What happened to all the ones like
Eine - Eine is not Emacs
Zwei - Zwei was Emacs initially ;)
et seq???

JKA
--
The Republic will endure.

Eric Fischer

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Nov 15, 2000, 3:00:00 AM11/15/00
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John Ahlstrom <jahl...@cisco.com> wrote:

> What happened to all the ones like
> Eine - Eine is not Emacs
> Zwei - Zwei was Emacs initially ;)
> et seq???

Well, I admitted it was vi-centric... Jamie Zawinski has a family tree
of Emacs versions at

http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html

and he's done a better job of it than I possibly could.

eric

Tom Van Vleck

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Nov 15, 2000, 3:00:00 AM11/15/00
to
Nice diagram. I think though that the relation between
TYPSET and ED on CTSS is wrong.

As I remember, ED came first. It edited "card image" files
like those edited by INPUT and EDIT. Several people worked
on ED and I think Charlie Garman took over maintenance.

Then "line marked" files were invented: these had
a control word with -1 in the left half and a byte count
in the right preceding each line, and trailing blanks trimmed.
TYPSET files were linemarked 12-bit character set files.
EDL was the same code as TYPSET but edited 6-bit character files.
EDL and TYPSET did not implement some of the fancier commands of ED.
EDA had the same command set but edited ASCII stream files
with 7-bit ASCII right justified in 9-bit bytes and lines
delimited by NL characters. TYPSET, EDL, EDA were by Saltzer.
Noel Morris might have done EDB, using Saltzer's libraries.
These were all copy-and-swap file editors.

Multics "edit" was a first attempt: I think it was never used,
too big, slow, and buggy. "edm" was like EDA rewritten in EPL.
Very simple, minimal features, meant to be fast: I think it
had a copy-and-swap philosophy including a "top" command but
it's been so long I forget.

qedx for Multics was written by Robert C. Daley. It was a
moving-gap editor.

John W Gintell

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Nov 15, 2000, 8:03:01 PM11/15/00
to
Eric Fischer wrote:??

>
> Well, I admitted it was vi-centric... Jamie Zawinski has a family tree
> of Emacs versions at
>
> http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html
>
> and he's done a better job of it than I possibly could.
>
> eric

I think what was most signficant is that Bernie started implementing
Multics emacs after RMS had started implementing emacs for ITS but long
before it was done and certainly before other versions were created. As
ITS emacs evolved, so did Multics emacs. Bernie pushed the MCS people
into supporting character echoing (probably has a more elegant name that
I have forgotten). This was a significant change in the evolution of
Multics from teletype style terminals to so-called glass TTYs.

Eric Fischer

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Nov 16, 2000, 1:58:35 AM11/16/00
to
John W Gintell <gin...@shore.net> wrote:

> Bernie pushed the MCS people into supporting character echoing (probably
> has a more elegant name that I have forgotten).

"Echo negotiation" is the term the Multics Technical Bulletins use.

eric

Eric Fischer

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Nov 16, 2000, 2:09:06 AM11/16/00
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Tom Van Vleck <th...@multicians.org> wrote:

> Nice diagram. I think though that the relation between
> TYPSET and ED on CTSS is wrong.

Thanks!

It would seem to make more sense that way, but the second edition
of The Compatible Time Sharing System: A Programmer's Guide seems
to indicate otherwise. In section AH.3.02, about ED, it says that
"the command is based on TYPSET... and many of the conventions of
TYPSET are used by ED." And section AH.9.01, about TYPSET, credits
the program's many inspirations, but does not mention ED.

The dates of the original reports documenting the programs give
further evidence. TYPSET is number 193, November 6, 1964, and
ED is number 195, November 20, 1964.

Thanks for the additional information about the other editors in
the family. Would you happen to know how eds (the editor whose
source code is printed in the Multics manual as an example) fits
in with the others?

eric

Robert A. Matern

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Nov 16, 2000, 2:42:13 AM11/16/00
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Jim Falksen wrote the TED editor for Multics, but I've forgotten (or never
knew) what its heritage was... Jim was unhappy with the choices available
at the time, that much I know.


--
+----------------------------------------+
| Robert A. Matern - - ACS Defense, Inc. |
| SMMTT Program - NUWC - Newport, RI USA |
| MAILTO:Robert_...@Compuserve.Com -|
| MAILTO:rma...@acsdefense.com - - - - -|
| MAILTO:to...@Matern.ORG - - - - - - - - |
+----------------------------------------+

Tom Van Vleck

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Nov 16, 2000, 3:00:00 AM11/16/00
to
Robert A. Matern wrote:
>
> Jim Falksen wrote the TED editor for Multics,
> but I've forgotten (or never knew) what its heritage was...

TED was a greatly enhanced qedx.

The story I remember was that there were various
proposals for editor enhancement in the mid 70s.
The qedx editor was pretty good for interactive
editing on a printing terminal, but its programmability
was less than that of TECO, if you can imagine such a thing.
(Typing \bx would insert the contents of buffer x.
Doing this at command level would execute buffer x as
commands. If a regexp search in a buffer failed, the
buffer interpretation would exit. That's it. I think
it was Joe Ossanna who programmed tic-tac-toe in QED.)

The arguments over what editor features to adopt and
what the ultimate editor interface should be were taking
a lot of time, and Charlie Clingen issued an edict,
the only case of management intervention in the design
process I can remember, that there would be no more
official work on editor design.

A few folks, Bernie and Jim among them, continued to think about
editors and to build tools for their own use and to share with
others. This was acceptable. TED had a number of nice
features and a few that were sort of half-done, or not as
general as they could be, or ... you see how easy it is to
get sucked into editor design, and matters of taste. So
the folks that liked TED used it, and it was put in the
"author maintained" library, and found its way to sites other
than System M, CISL, and MIT. But it was not an official part
of the system, and system maintenance macros could not use
TED features. I think TED became part of the system and was
added to the "tools" library in 1981.

While all this was going on, video terminals were replacing
printing terminals, and line speeds were rising from 300
baud max to 2400, 9600, and on up, and Bernie was working on
Emacs, which was a much better editor for that environment.

karger

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Nov 16, 2000, 3:00:00 AM11/16/00
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In article <8v016i$jkm$1...@bob.news.rcn.net>,
Eric Fischer <e...@pobox.com> writes:

|>
|> Thanks for the additional information about the other editors in
|> the family. Would you happen to know how eds (the editor whose
|> source code is printed in the Multics manual as an example) fits
|> in with the others?
|>

eds was a subset of edm that was written by Jerry Saltzer to serve as a
working example of how to write Multics PL/I system-type code and to show
how simple it was to write a text editor when you have a single-level file
store with files (segments) directly mappable. I don't recall if he wrote
it primarily for classroom purposes or primarily for an example in the
manual.

It was definitely a functional editor. When I was working on Multics
at the Air Force's Electronic Systems Division, one project we were doing
was to experiment with word processing for the secretarial staff. They
would prepare memos, tech reports, etc. on Multics using a text editor
and runoff. Initially, we taught the secretaries to use eds, because the
command set was smaller than other editors, and therefore was easier to
learn. Remember that at this time (early 1970s), almost all typing was
done on typewriters, and using a computer for secretarial tasks
was a very radical idea. Later, as a secretary became more comfortable with
using a computer, we taught them edm or qedx.

Tom Van Vleck

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Nov 16, 2000, 3:00:00 AM11/16/00
to
Eric Fischer wrote:
> It would seem to make more sense that way, but the second edition
> of The Compatible Time Sharing System: A Programmer's Guide seems
> to indicate otherwise. In section AH.3.02, about ED, it says that
> "the command is based on TYPSET... and many of the conventions of
> TYPSET are used by ED." And section AH.9.01, about TYPSET, credits
> the program's many inspirations, but does not mention ED.
>
> The dates of the original reports documenting the programs give
> further evidence. TYPSET is number 193, November 6, 1964, and
> ED is number 195, November 20, 1964.

I stand corrected. A few weeks' difference in report dates
may not indicate much more than who wrote up his program
first, but the CTSS manual is definitive.

>
> Thanks for the additional information about the other editors in
> the family. Would you happen to know how eds (the editor whose
> source code is printed in the Multics manual as an example) fits
> in with the others?

I think eds was a drastically pruned version of edm,
with all the complexity and speedups pruned out for clarity.

Tom Van Vleck

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Nov 16, 2000, 3:00:00 AM11/16/00
to
There were, of course, other trees in the editor forest.

The WYLBUR/ORVYL line that originated at Stanford
had a different approach to line editing.

DTSS started with a simple line-numbered file where
you could only replace whole lines, insert new ones by
using interpolated line nubmers, and renumber if you
ran out of interpolation room. Then I think there
was a single-line-fix command added, and then a context
editor, but I don't remember the details.

CMS EDIT was an ED/EDL descendant. Stu Madnick may have
been the original creator. What did TSS/360 use for an editor?

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