Fwd: is there any word processing software for the pdp11?

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Tue Dec 2 13:03:07 CST 2014


    > From: Rich Alderson

    > The first non-PDP-10 port was written in MACLISP for Multics--a 36-bit
    > architecture!--by Bernie Greenberg

Depends on what you define as 'EMACS'... :-) The PDP-11 TECO with real-time
display mode which I was talking about earlier had, when in real-time mode, a
command on every single control character, most of them the same as EMACS.
(E.g. typing ^U^K would kill 4 lines, from the point onward.) And you could
write custom code for it. (In TECO, no less!) But it didn't have the rich
command set of EMACS (although as of that date, EMACS was still in a bit of
flux - many people still had their own private macros/command sets - MOON's
was famously different).

According to:

  http://www.multicians.org/mepap.html

(which is a very nice, complete, history of Multics Emacs, BTW), Multics Emacs
didn't run until March, 1978; the PDP-11 real-time display TECO was running
well before that. (We all used ITS some, for ARPANET email, etc, so we wanted
the same kind of powerful editing tool.)

Not that it really matters any more - just trying to be historically accurate!


    > From: Jerome H. Fine

    > Since the "Subject" specified "word processing software", I assumed
    > that would exclude TECO which I regard as a "text editor" 

Two words: 'topic drift'! :-) Hey, just responding to other messages (e.g.
above).


    > From: Chuck Guzis

    > DIBOL. :)

Hey, if you're running one of the later 11's, the ones with CIS, reputedly
DIBOL runs _really fast_ on them! (Well, fast for an -11... :-)


	Noel


More information about the cctech mailing list