I knew about acoustic delay lines, but a mechanical delay line is mind boggling! Thanks.
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [[email protected]] on behalf of Wayne Bickerdike [[email protected]] Sent: Friday, January 29, 2021 5:42 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: ISPF for mainframe Linux Seymour Wrote: *I would guess that there are more people here who have written a text editor than there are who have used only one.* True, I inherited one written in COBOL for a Sycor 445. The machine is described here: http://secure-web.cisco.com/163zjmUr1Oq4O7-rCUDmYSYn_f5yvRGmq2UPVII6TKbubL7DsOGRHsZ4cJAgWM9TwY3LIcalLOCdTZ_RBSmswmmMnEux4r4H2I5FIMHE9wXcuBtNO297_tiWM82sB9xqMOa7H221SxAD8bNlYHStyWXNFzEl6rjR-XC48V_tfLZnibO9pv7OPt_0j-Zv-ffUC5MgDNqnZLiFjKh_peW3lDiTUDRCutc8-3W5Wba43ZkGojY3zF6K8ClH-1-THWUOP7h02WH7go6JRMNhlzI51m5yWfr45P4Mwm7oz5Wq3spGrOCwgxCD515t4c1_za2De0_TV2OGcggj5K_S2z8EAod4bqQeBocsmvghcGwDJPBmxyvnIhdJIyJf9VMSsnnBaAinMZzp3ZAC6jOQvumdAqz-D-keKjc_e_DYZrjljF6drteGQDH4-goCRYKVg0DSA/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.satyam.com.ar%2Fcomphist.htm I modified it to work as a data entry "simplifier". Full screen editors were always a dream when I came away from MVS for a while. In that interregnum, our editor of choice was Wordmaster which morphed into Wordstar and it perhaps was the forerunner of those Control key combos a lot of us utilise. A fair few famous authors still use and love Wordstar or its descendents. Necessity is the mother of invention. Glad someone invented ISPF edit macros. Others have a different vi(ew!) On Sat, Jan 30, 2021 at 6:45 AM Seymour J Metz <[email protected]> wrote: > I would guess that there are more people here who have written a text > editor than there are who have used only one. > > > -- > Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz > http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 > > ________________________________________ > From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [[email protected]] on behalf > of Jeremy Nicoll [[email protected]] > Sent: Friday, January 29, 2021 2:06 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: ISPF for mainframe Linux > > On Fri, 29 Jan 2021, at 03:27, David Crayford wrote: > > > No offense taken. You may find it far fetched but it's true. I'm > > cognizant to the fact that most folks on here only know ISPF > > and have no experience of using an IDE or text editor > > like vim or emacs. > > I think it's pretty likely that many (if not most) people here will have > used a great many text editors, though maybe not recently. > > In my case, I wrote one when I was a student. It wasn't very good, but > one written by a peer was so good that the whole student body, staff > etc all stopped using the system-provided one (on DEC VAXes running, > I suppose, VMS). > > Later, though while still a student, I wrote one in APL (for IBM) which > vaguely resembled Xedit (though only had a handful of commands) > but still made editing of APL functions a whole lot easier than with the > default editor in APL. > > Later, I wrote a PF-key driven editor (that is users did not have to > remember any commands; everything they did was selected by > pressing various PF keys whose labels (and actions) were context > sensitive. That was designed for use by very naive users who did > not have (allocated lecture-course) time to learn to use anything > complex. > > In the 1980s, I wrote from scratch a structured editor which, I guess, > would be a bit like a document editor that these days would read a > DTD to determine the syntax etc of a language and allow a valid XML > document that complied with that DTD to be edited. I invented the > definition language, wrote a parser and compiler for it, then wrote the > editor to use the compiled skeletal framework. And... it was all done in > COBOL as that was the only licenced/supported language my employers > would let me do it in. It had to be able to handle documents whose > size exceeded the addressable working storage size of the COBOL > compiler we had (and certainly exceeded the spare space there after > all the program's own working storage structures were defined), and of > course it had to handle free format text and variable length strings. I > started off by implementing a sort of paging subsystem that dynamically > paged parts of the document that was being edited in and out of work > files, and designed that so that the values stored in those files - both > user > data & control tables for the document structure could be arbitrary sizes. > The editor also had a (programmers-only) interactive debugger which > could follow linked-lists of data, and force garbage collection of that > managed storage etc). > > On RISC OS systems I've used the default editor (which is poor, somewhat > like Notepad) and a programmers' editor named StrongED, which is not > quite an IDE but is very powerful ... but dates back to when systems had > only a few MB of RAM. > > On Windows PCs I've used around four other programmers' editors, but > lack of scriptability, or a requirement to learn a script language that was > only usable inside that editor and a command set that didn't directly > relate to the commands users used (or actions only available from mouse > operated menus and no command line), made using them a struggle > compared with Kedit... even allowing for the fact that I started to use > Kedit > for real more than 20 years after I last used Xedit, with 18 or so years' > use > of ispf edit in the middle period to confuse me. > > -- > Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own. > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > -- Wayne V. Bickerdike ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
