There is an interesting historical parallel between the development of editors in DOS and Unix. In the early 70s, when Unix was young, the editors that came with it was ``ed'' (for editor) and later an expanded version called ``ex''. In ed, text lines in a file were shown on the screen, one line at a time, and you could only edit an entire line, not a word, character, and so on. Needless to say, ``ed'' was called a line editor. Later vi (visual) replaced ed and was said to be a ``full screen'' editor. This meant vi displayed the text lines in a file, 24 lines at a time. That is, you can see a file one (text) screenful at a time. And you could move a cursor on the screen to a particular word or character, and edit it, rather than the entire line that contained it. However, like Microsoft would do later, vi was not a full replacement for ed. Instead, vi was built on top of it, like windows was built on dos. Like opening a ``DOS box'' when you hit the colon (``:'') key, you ``drop down'' from vi into the line editor, ex, so that you can execute the old commands that work on entire lines. Much later in time, DOS started with the line editor, edlin, and later replaced it with the full screen editor, edit. However, to my knowledge edit was not an extension of edlin like vi was an extension of ed. To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies.
