Hacker News Reader

Comment by russellbeattie | Hacker News Reader

Just for fun, here's the famous pic of Gates and Allen using what looks like a Teletype Model 33 [1], and of course Ritchie and Thompson in front of a PDP-11 [2].

For years (decades!) I never understood the purpose of line editors and why VI was such an improvement. Until one day I saw the pic of Gates and Allen and suddenly realized why, and how it worked. You already had a printout of your code (or text) in front of you. If you wanted to edit the text, you used a line editor to rewrite the line it was on. After a while you could print the whole thing again if you needed.

And this is why my TRS-80's BASIC editor worked the same way. It was just like the original time-share version from Dartmouth ported to a microcomputer.

1. https://www.charterworld.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2018/10...

2. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/teletype/ken-and...

View on HN

On line-editors, it is bit funny that even the most hard-core cli enthusiastics draw the line there and use some sort of visual editor despite line editors being more pure cli thing. Has anyone seen anyone do any non-trivial coding or other work with line-editors?

I imagine that the code editing experience for blind people might be somewhat comparable to using line-editors? Although especially with hard copy terminals you don't need to keep everything in your head

I doubt many "hard-core cli enthusiasts" desire some sort of digital self flagellation, but instead strive for efficiency. Full screen editors are efficient, and was very quickly adopted when made available.

Line editors prevailed for a long time, not because of user preferences but because they were tiny and was shipped by default. In PC-DOS/MS-DOS edlin.com/exe was what was available until the full screen editor edit.exe shipped some years into the 90s. Almost all home computers came with a variant of BASIC in ROM, which also used line editing (not even with a proper editor but by substitution of whole lines).

I used line editors in the mid 80s on old-at-the-time systems. Some editors supported both line and screen modes, but we didn't have the more expensive terminal which would have allowed screen mode (there were a class of glass ttys with no cursor positioning commands available).

It's pretty easy to get used to line editors, you get used to using the search command to position the cursor on the correct line and change command to modify it. Some friendly line editors include DEC's EDI and EDT (PDP-11) and E (Motorola Exorciser).

UNIX ed is nice in that it has has regex support, but I don't like its side effects- that p, l and i change the cursor line.

I had no use for edlin since screen editors were available on the IBM PC.

I tried but never got used to TECO: this is like a screen editor, but no screen: meaning the cursor could be anywhere in the file, including in the middle of a line and it's up to you remember where it is. Some TECOs had a screen mode where it would show you the buffer and cursor position in one window, but accepted normal TECO commands in a separate command window ("TVI" on TOPS-20 worked like this, EMACS was a TECO extension).

I remember a post on here a while ago arguing for using ed. I think it was mostly about scripting contexts and batch processing, not interactive editing.

I use 'sed' most days.

If you programmed BASIC (or for that matter other languages) on micros in 1980s, line editors were prevalent.

The bbcbasic list, ren, auto commands and copy key were very beginner friendly line editors. Super easy to grok.

Unix and ed for sure, before they wrote ex and vi.

Note to anyone with HTTPS-only mode enabled in their browser: that second link won't work because it's only served over HTTP and not the HTTPS link it is replaced by.

Here's an archive link instead: https://web.archive.org/web/20240226112837/http://www.columb...

> If you wanted to edit the text, you used a line editor to rewrite the line it was on. After a while you could print the whole thing again if you needed.

That's probably also part of why when you used line numbers in early BASIC, you left plenty of numerical gaps, so you didn't have to re-print as often.

I assume it’s also because reusing a line number means losing whatever code was previously there, and if you find a bug and need to add extra code you don’t want to rewrite part of what is correct just to add a few instructions in between, whether on a teletype or on a terminal with a screen.

It wasn't that bad, you could renumber programs with a single command if you got stuck with no room to insert a line.

The BASIC I grew up with (Applesoft Basic) didn't have a built-in command to renumber a program, but it did have a helper tool you could run from disk. Unfortunately, it only updated the number of each line - it didn't update the line number references in commands like GOTO or GOSUB, so it was pretty much useless for any program large enough that you might want to automate renumbering.

That's the first time seeing that Gates photo for me. He would've been 14 or 15 years old.

Gates actually wrote about the photo in a blog post he wrote after Allen passed away. [1]

> The first time I saw how passionate Paul could get about something, I was in 8th grade. This picture might make you think he was my teacher, but he was actually a sophomore, just a little less than three years older than me.

> This teletype is the thing that brought us together. Our school, Lakeside, held a rummage sale and used the proceeds to buy a teletype terminal. We were obsessed with it. The problem was, it was really expensive to use – 40 dollars an hour! The only way for us to get computer time was by exploiting a bug in the system.

1. https://www.gatesnotes.com/Forbes-Philanthropy-Summit-honors...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com