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

[Rich Alderson]

From: Noel Chiappa
Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2014 11:03 AM

>> 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!

Thank you.  I appreciate the correction.  I admit to a bias towards the PDP-10
and other big iron in my own career, so I bow to one who was there!

I used Multics Emacs when I was given the project of putting the University of
Chicago on an MMDF-based phone network sponsored by EDUCOM and called EDUnet.
MIT-MULTICS was the hub for the system, so I had an account there and was very
happy to find my favorite editor available.  That was 1983-84, after which I
moved to Stanford.  The rest, as they say, is boring old stuff^W^W^Whistory.

                                                                Rich

Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/