Hacker News Reader

Comment by Izkata | Hacker News Reader

I see MS-DOS is mentioned near the bottom, but the part I was most curious about was not.

When I got my dad's old Windows 3.1 laptop somewhere around 1999, I discovered DOS and started fiddling with it, eventually discovering the "edlin" editor. Everyone else though it was bizarre and hard to use, but I really liked it because I could look at different parts of a file at the same time.

The commands were similar to the example given here for ed, but the output much much easier to read. Does anyone know if it was another clone or just coincidence?

View on HN

Ed, man! !man ed https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

>When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a “viitor”. Not a “emacsitor”. Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!

>TEXT EDITOR.

>When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their “edlin” on a Unix standard, did they mimic vi? No. Emacs? Surely you jest. They chose the most karmic editor of all. The standard.

> Does anyone know if it was another clone or just coincidence?

EDLIN was a clone of CP/M ED. Was CP/M ED influenced by Unix ed? I don't know, but I somewhat doubt it. Gary Kildall's primary background was in IBM mainframe and DEC minicomputer systems (in particular VM/CMS and TOPS-10), and so it seems to me more likely that CP/M ED was influenced by DEC or IBM line editors, than by Unix.

That said, Unix and IBM mainframe operating systems share some common heritage. Both were influenced by CTSS. So, it may be that any observed similarities between CP/M and Unix line editors could be due to that shared ancestry, rather than any direct influence of Unix on CP/M.

CP/M ED is more in the TECO tradition than anything else, through the DEC influence. It is oriented around characters rather than around lines as the ed family is.

And if you keep going back, TECO (like QED) can be traced back (via ports, rewrites, shared authors, etc) to the PDP 1 and Colossal Typewriter. All those histories are intertwingled back then.

Heh, I'd forgotten that EMACS started out as "editor macros" that were eventually ported from TECO's command language to MacLisp.

I was around 12 and got an assembly programming book. It stated that one has to use decent text editor like edlin to write assembly. Well, I went for it and even entered few programs until realizing that under norton’s F3 it is just a regular text file. After a little frustration and experiments with F4 I understood that edlin wasn’t special for editing .asm files. F8 on edlin.exe was the first thing I did afterwards. Or was it edlin.com back then?

During the DOS 5.0 days I discovered EDIT.COM and the split windows blew my mind. I would view function prototypes or structs while writing code in the window below. And I could do it in 80x43 instead of 80x25!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com