Found my favorite DOS editor

On 9/29/21 10:22 PM, Ethan Dicks via cctalk wrote: Okay, story time. Back in the early-mid 1970s, I found myself on the CDC STAR-100 project software being run out of Sunnyvale. While we had two 1/100th speed emulators on-site, the Real Thing was back in Arden Hills at the end of a 9600 bps leased line, multiplexed locally to several 1200 bps async lines. (Remember the Bell 209 modem?). A WYSIWYG editor was out of the question at 1200 bps and fairly primitive CRT terminals, a line editor was the choice. The one supplied with the system software was terrible and awkward, so I decided to bootleg a better one. For those of you who don't know the old iron, the STAR-100/(later CYBER 200) was a big (physically large) vector machine with virtual memory and a huge instruction set. Its fatal weak point was that scalars were treated as vectors of length 1, and so created bubbles in the two vector unit pipelines. But golly, with a 48 bit addressing space, vector lengths up to 65K elements, all sorts of fancy bitmapped control vectors, and the ability to map an entire file into an address range (leave the I/O to the pager), the thing was begging for some experimentation. So I threw together a line-oriented editor using mostly vector and string instructions and called it OGNATE (for Oh god not another text editor). It only took a couple of days of scribbling. I revisited the big vector scene a decade later after a detour into the micro world, when CDC spun off ETA systems to produce a liquid nitrogen-cooled version, initially called the GF-10, later the ETA-10. On the west coast, we were doing our initial development on a VAX 11/750, but at some point I asked the folks back in St. Paul what they were using for an editor. OGNATE! I was dumbfounded--you see, the ETA-10 has many fewer instructions than the STAR-100 did, among the missing were some of the more esoteric ones used in OGNATE. Someone had painstakingly coded emulations for each of those instructions. Ah, memories... --Chuck