UNIX V7

[Warren Wolfe]

Doug Jackson wrote:
> Chuck Guzis wrote:
>> On 9 Jun 2009 at 13:49, John Floren wrote:
>>
>>  
>>> ed /is/ the standard editor
>>>     
>>
>> Just curious, does anyone here use (as their editor) Epsilon?
>>
>> --Chuck
>>
>>   
> No - I don't but I am reminded of my youth.
>
> Years ago I used to repair PC's (Back when you had to type stuff to do 
> things, and when the 8087 was just awesome...)  My editor of choice 
> was the MSDOS EDLIN tool.  Without fail, every client who watched me 
> working asked why I didn't use QEDIT34 or ExtraED98 or 
> "InsertAwesomeEditorNameHere", to which I would always reply - 'you 
> may have "InsertAwesomeEditorNameHere", but I can never guarantee the 
> next client will have it, so I got good at using the standard editor!
>
> That saved me so much time! 
All true, but EDLIN was way dumb.  Reliable, but dumb.  When I went to 
client sites, I always took a few diskettes -- and would load some 
public domain utilities and some batch files to the client machines.  
Among these diskettes was a copy of PC vi, and an editor called 
"BlackBeard" which was very cool.  Among other characteristics, it would 
format a block of plain text, by breaking at word boundaries, and leave 
a plain ASCII text file.  Very nice.  I just looked around, and found a 
page of software downloads for editors:

http://www.eunet.bg/simtel.net/msdos/editor-pre.html

PC XEDIT is there, which was mentioned lately.  Gosh, it's like an 
ecumenical convention over there!  <Grin>

Warren