On Fri, 5 Jun 2020, Russell Senior wrote:

Sometime in the early 1980s, I used a line editor on some kind of
mainframe at OSU, I think it was a Honeywell. The editor had a name like
xedit. I have gone looking for any references to it, and found nothing. As
a natural hoarder, I find this kind of historical obliteration disturbing.

In the mid- to late-1970s I used TDP (Text and Data Processor), a
line-oriented editor on a monochrome terminal in my lab that was connected
by 1200 baud audio modem to an HP-3000 mini-computer at the Idaho State
University computer in the Business School. I used it to type my
dissertation.

My problem was not paying attention to the character counter on the screen
and neglecting to press the [Return] key after 80 characters so I routinely
had lines truncated by TDP. So I had to exit add mode, figure out what was
lost in edit mode, then go back to add mode. Of course, typos and other
changes required switching to delete mode. A typewriter would have been
easier. :-)

Printing hard copy used a Diablo electronic typewriter with me standing
there feeding in one page at a time and removing each typed page. For six
copies of the dissertation.

That's why I don't like vi (vim) and much prefer the page-oriented emacs as
a text editor.

Rich

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