Lonn Dugan wrote:
Since earliest days of Unix -- vi was/is a screen editor; ed, a line at a time tool. (see edlin in earliest PC DOS) Wouldn't you love to have earliest edition of Brian W. Kernighan/Rob Pike "The Unix Programming Environment" or Brian W. Kernighan/Dennis M. Ritchie "The C Programming Language"
Somewhere around here is a Ken Thompson masterpiece - and to clear up an earlier item: Ken Thompson, in 1969, began writing the Unix kernel (a small general purpose time sharing-system) on salvaged DEC PDP-7 store room junk. By 1970, C development was started on a PDP-11, and by 1973, the kernel had been rewritten in C by Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson and compiled with Dennis M. Ritchie's C Compiler. In 1974 Unix was first licensed to universities "for educational purposes."
Lonn C. Dugan
For many years it was said that the single most thing that held Unix back was the lack of a decent editor, simply they were all supremely lousy. I've used vi for over 23 years on a regular basis and I don't think much of it or any of the other Unix editors designed for octupuses and trained concert pianists - the likes of Joe. Then I met YEEEEUUUUUKKK!!!! "ksh -o vi" in Solaris, an example of how to waste brain cells, so I stuck two fingers up to learning that rubbish, at least bash and arrow keys made life more tolerable and I installed bash as my first act on a Solaris box if allowed by the customer. I gave a demo of SPF/PC (A version of the IBM MVS editor ported to DOS) to our local Linux group about 14 years ago to demonstrate what a decent editor was like and I think they understood my loathing of Unix editors/edlin that looked like they were written as a project at the school for retarded programmers. I was taught SPF in about 10 minutes and I've taught SPF to others also within 10 minutes, it being as intuitive as you'll ever get. I use vi for simple stuff, insert/delete/replace and cooledit if I ever have any substantial editing to be done. Regards Sid. <STUFF DELETED> -- Sid Boyce ... Hamradio License G3VBV, licensed Private Pilot Retired IBM/Amdahl Mainframes and Sun/Fujitsu Servers Tech Support Specialist Microsoft Windows Free Zone - Linux used for all Computing Tasks