Concepts of the Text Editor Lara (1985) | Hacker News Reader

Concepts of the Text Editor Lara (1985)

dl.acm.org

30 pointstodsacerdoti8 comments

This is very interesting for me, I’ve been collecting documentation on old text editors and I hadn’t seen this one.

The machine it ran on, the “Lilith Workstation”, sounded familiar and searching for it I saw that yes, I had read about and seen pictures of that machine before, made at ETH Zürich by Modula Systems in 1980:

“The DISER Lilith is a custom built workstation computer based on the Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) 2901 bit slicing processor, created by a group led by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zürich.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith_(computer)

There is a video from a Swiss TV programme in 1983 here: https://inf.ethz.ch/news-and-events/spotlights/infk-news-cha... But it “is not available outside of Switzerland”, so I can’t check whether the Lara text editor is included in the demonstration.

I am able to view it by using a VPN (private internet access in my case).

It looks like Lara, however my German is simply not good enough to say for sure...

>> There is a video from a Swiss TV programme in 1983 here: https://inf.ethz.ch/news-and-events/spotlights/infk-news-cha... But it “is not available outside of Switzerland”, [...].

> I am able to view it by using a VPN (private internet access in my case). It looks like Lara, however my German is simply not good enough to say for sure...

I wrote to ETH Zürich asking about this, and they replied immediately thanking me for telling them as they had not noticed that it could only be watched from Switzerland, and confirming that I would have to ask the TV station that aired it, SRF Schweizer Radio und Fersehen, Swiss Radio and Television.

My email to SRF mentioned that I had noticed they do have a YouTube channel with many other programmes at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd0NmHBRRAq5O-ye7kx_VlQ and asking whether this video too could be made public.

Thew forwarded the question to Telepool Zürich, the agency handling licensing for their archive, which kindly sent a detailed response quoting the price for such custom request, for private use only, of 260 CHF + VAT in DVD or 99 CHF + VAT as a file.

That’s a fair price for a custom request, but I’m not that interested in paying just to watch it.

I am interested in looking into your collection. Text editors facinates me a lot.

I'd love to see some of that research / documentation if you have it and willing to share. I've haphazardly done the same but without much organizing. I'd be willing to contribute / organize.

Huh. I was hoping this might talk about the UI/UX, but instead it's about data structures. Looks like they used ropes and had a pretty decent design.

Id be very interesting in reading a collection of details/documentation for old text editors and paradigms if you are interested in publishing it somewhere.

https://bediger4000.github.io/perfect.editor.html

I don't think there's been an awful lot of recent research, and even the older research seems fishy in some aspects. I don't think that user expertise has been adequately considered.

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