GNU ed 1.6 released

Posted Jan 3, 2012 19:38 UTC (Tue) by nicku (subscriber, #777)
Parent article: GNU ed 1.6 released

It's strange to relate how happy I was writing all my (mostly Pascal) computing assignments at UNSW in ed on the locally compiled Unix through 2400 bps green terminals in 1986--1989. About twenty of us simultaneously wrote 6809 assembly language programs on a time-share OS/9 system running on one 68000 CPU in an ed-like editor.

GNU ed 1.6 released

Posted Jan 3, 2012 21:00 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, ed was optimized for use with DECwriters spitting out characters at 300 baud (and I'm old enough that I actually used it as intended).

GNU ed 1.6 released

Posted Jan 9, 2012 15:43 UTC (Mon) by ndk (subscriber, #43509) [Link]

Ah, those were the days: back in the late 70s/early 80s, we had a Prime 750 running PrimOS (anybody remember those?) with an IBM-inspired line editor from the mid-60s as the system editor: if you think ed is frustrating, you should try that beast. I spent a lot of pleasant all-nighters on a terminal with a 300-baud modem porting the Kernighan & Plauger software tools to PL1/G; of course I started with ed. After that bootstrap step, there was a quantum leap in productivity (and a 1200-baud modem upgrade helped, but not as much). The ed port (and quite a few of the other tools) was actually used in the classroom for a few years, before Prime actually paid somebody to port emacs to their OS.