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They didn't have Ctrl+F back then?

BTW this reminds me of Ctrl+R in Bash (reverse search). Try it if you don't know it!

They didn’t. Like many other features we take for granted today, full text search was a challenge in the early days.

You have 64K RAM and the data is on a 360K floppy. Not only is the floppy very slow to deliver data, it takes several seconds to seek to a location. The user data may be in many different formats. How do you search for arbitrary strings interactively, fast enough that it feels like you can just “leap” to the next occurrence?

I think you might be thinking of the Swyft Card, which was an Apple ][ card that implemented a number of similar features before the Cat was released. My Cat has 256k of RAM and uses 800k floppies. However, by default it just copies the RAM straight to disk and doesn't use any more than 256k of the floppy. You CAN access the rest of the disk via FORTH, but it's a PitA and you don't really get a file system as much as a block device.

FWIW, the computer in TFA had 256k each of RAM and ROM, a 256K floppy disk and was running a 5MHz 68k. Fairly beefy for a single-task computer.

If you use Ctrl-R a lot (and even if you don't), I recommend trying out https://github.com/junegunn/fzf, makes it a lot easier to use for me.

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