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I love this!

first time I see people use 'ed' for work!!!

I wonder who else has to deal with ed also... recently I had to connect to an ancient system where vi was not available, I had to write my own editor, so whoever needs an editor for an ancient system, ping me (it is not too fancy).

amazing work by the creators of this software and by the researchers, you have my full respect guys. those are the real engineers!

▲ wpollock 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I remember using an ed-like editor on a Honeywell timeshare system in the 1960s, over a Teltype ASR-33. I don't remember much except you invoked it using "make <filename>" to create a new file. And if you typed "make love" the editor would print "not war" before entering the editor.

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skissane 2 days ago | parent [-]

The “MAKE LOVE”/“NOT WAR” easter egg was in TECO for DEC PDP-6/10 machines. But DEC TECO was also ported to Multics, so maybe that was the Honeywell machine you used it on.

But, for a whole bunch of reasons, I’m left with the suspicion you may be misremembering something from the early 1970s as happening in the 1960s. While it isn’t totally impossible you had this experience in 1968 or 1969, a 1970s date would be much more historically probable

	▲	flyinghamster 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The easter egg carried over to the PDP-11 as well. I remember it being present in RSTS/E 7.0's TECO back in my high school days, and I just fired up SIMH and found it's definitely there. On the other hand, I never really tried to do anything with TECO other than run VTEDIT.
	▲	wpollock 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You're probably right. It definitely was teco and likely 1970ish.

▲ pjmlp 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not ed, but definilty inspired by it, I am old enough to have done typewriting school exam on MS-DOS 3.3 edlin.

And since then never used it ever again, nor ed when a couple of years later we had Xenix access, as vi was much saner alternative.

	▲	skissane 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I also remember using MS-DOS 3.3 EDLIN in anger, on our home computer [0] when I was roughly 8, because it was the only general purpose text editor we had. (We also had Wordstar, which I believe could save files in plain text mode, but I don’t think my dad or I knew that at the time.) I didn’t do much with it but used it to write some simple batch files. My dad had created a directory called C:\BAT and we used it a bit like a menu system, we put batch files in it to start other programs. I don’t remember any PC-compatible machines at my school, it was pretty much all Apple IIs, although the next year moved to a new school which as well as Apple IIs, also had IBM PC JXs (IBM Japan variant of the IBM PCjr which was sold to schools in Australia/New Zealand) and Acorn Archimedes. [0] it was an IBM PC clone, an ISA bus 386SX, made by TPG - TPG are now one of Australia’s leading ISPs, but in the late 1980s were a PC clone manufacturer. It had a 40Mb hard disk, two 5.25 inch floppy drives (one 1.2Mb, the other 360Kb), and a vacant slot for a 3.5 inch floppy, we didn’t actually install the floppy in it until later. I still have it, but some of the innards were replaced, I think the motherboard currently in it is a 486 or Pentium

▲ kragen 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I used ed in Termux on my cellphone to write http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/justhash.c in August. Someone, I forget who, had mentioned they were using ed on their cellphone because the Android onscreen keyboard was pretty terrible for vi, which is true. So I tried it. I decided that, on the cellphone, ed was a little bit worse than vi, but they are bad in different ways. It really is much easier to issue commands to ed than to vi on the keyboard (I'm using HeliBoard) but a few times I got confused about the state of the buffer in a way that I wouldn't with vi. Possibly that problem would improve with practice, but I went back to using vi.

▲ relistan 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In the mid 90s we had an AT&T 3B2 that only had ed on it. We used it via DEC VT-102 terminals. It (ed) works but it’s not fun by any modern standards. Must’ve been amazing on a screen compared to printout from a teletype though!

Side note: that ~1 MIP 3B2 could support about 20 simultaneous users…

▲ wglb 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

An early consulting gig was to write a tutorial for ed (on the Coherent system). I often use ed--in fact I used it yesterday. I needed to edit something without clearing the screen.

Earlier, I wrote an editor for card images stored on disks. Very primitive.

▲ kps 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In my first computing job I used ed for about six months (we didn't have character-mode I/O yet). I learned to make good use of regular expressions.

▲ ajross 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Interestingly it's actually a sort of degenerate use of ed. All it does is append one line to an empty buffer and write it to "hello.c". It's literally the equivalent of

    echo 'int main(void) { printf("hello!\n"); }' > hello.c

...EXCEPT...

It's not, because the shell redirection operators didn't exist yet at this point in time. Maybe (or maybe not?) it would work to cat to the file from stdin and send a Ctrl-D down the line to close the descriptor. But even that might have been present yet. Unix didn't really "look like Unix" until v7, which introduced the Bourne shell and most of the shell environment we know today.

▲ WhyNotHugo 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The keystokes are pretty much what you'd press in vim to perform the same actions. Except that append mode ends when they finished the line (apparently) rather than having to press Esc.

The feedback from the editor, however, is… challenging.

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rchard2scout 2 days ago | parent [-]

In ed, append mode ends by entering a single '.' on an empty line, and then pressing enter. You can see that happening in the article.

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ThePowerOfFuet 2 days ago | parent [-]

Now we know where SMTP got it, I guess.

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kragen 2 days ago | parent [-]

That's possible but unlikely. MTP as defined by Suzanne Sluizer and Jon Postel in RFC 772 in September 01980 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc772 seems to have been where SMTP got that convention for ending the message:

> ...and considers all succeeding lines to be the message text. It is terminated by a line containing only a period, upon which a 250 completion reply is returned.

But in 01980 Unix had only been released outside of Bell Labs for five years and was only starting to support ARPANET connections (using NCP), so I wouldn't expect it to be very influential on ARPANET protocol design yet. I believe both Sluizer and Postel were using TOPS-20; the next year the two of them wrote RFC 786 about an interface used under TOPS-20 at ISI (Postel's institution, not sure if Sluizer was also there) between MTP and NIMAIL.

For some context, RFC 765, the June 01980 version of FTP, extensively discusses the TOPS-20 file structure, mentions NLS in passing, and mentions no other operating systems in that section at all. In another section, it discusses how different hardware typically handles ASCII:

> For example, NVT-ASCII has different data storage representations in different systems. PDP-10's generally store NVT-ASCII as five 7-bit ASCII characters, left-justified in a 36-bit word. 360's store NVT-ASCII as 8-bit EBCDIC codes. Multics stores NVT-ASCII as four 9-bit characters in a 36-bit word. It may be desirable to convert characters into the standard NVT-ASCII representation when transmitting text between dissimilar systems.

Note the complete absence of either of the hardware platforms Unix could run on in this list!

(Technically Multics is software, not hardware, but it only ever ran on a single hardware platform, which was built for it.)

RFC 771, Cerf and Postel's "mail transition plan", admits, "In the following, the discussion will be hoplessly [sic] TOPS20[sic]-oriented. We appologize [sic] to users of other systems, but we feel it is better to discuss examples we know than to attempt to be abstract." RFC 773, Cerf's comments on the mail service transition plan, likewise mentions TOPS-20 but not Unix. RFC 775, from December 01980, is about Unix, and in particular, adding hierarchical directory support to FTP:

> BBN has installed and maintains the software of several DEC PDP-11s running the Unix operating system. Since Unix has a tree-like directory structure, in which directories are as easy to manipulate as ordinary files, we have found it convenient to expand the FTP servers on these machines to include commands which deal with the creation of directories. Since there are other hosts on the ARPA net which have tree-like directories, including Tops-20 and Multics, we have tried to make these commands as general as possible.

RFC 776 (January 01981) has the email addresses of everyone who was a contact person for an Internet Assigned Number, such as JHaverty@BBN-Unix, Hornig@MIT-Multics, and Mathis@SRI-KL (a KL-10 which I think was running TOPS-20). I think four of the hosts mentioned are Unix machines.

So, there was certainly contact between the Unix world and the internet world at that point, but the internet world was almost entirely non-Unix, and so tended to follow other cultural conventions. That's why, to this day, commands in SMTP and header lines in HTTP/1.1 are terminated by CRLF and not LF; why FTP and SMTP commands are all four letters long and case-insensitive; and why reply codes are three-digit hierarchical identifiers.

So I suspect the convention of terminating input with "." on a line of its own got into ed(1) and SMTP from a common ancestor.

I think Sluizer is still alive. (I suspect I met her around 01993, though I don't remember any details.) Maybe we could ask her.

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bbanyc 2 days ago | parent [-]

The "." to terminate input was used in FTP mail on ARPANET, defined in RFC 385 which was well before anyone outside Bell had heard of Unix.

	▲	kragen a day ago \| parent [-]
		Oh wow, really? I didn't look because I assumed mail over FTP was transferred over a separate data connection, just like other files. Thank you! And yes, in August 01972 probably nobody at MIT had ever used ed(1) at Bell Labs. Not impossible, but unlikely; in June, Ritchie had written, "[T]he number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected." But nothing about it had been published outside Bell Labs. The rationale is interesting: > The 'MLFL' command for network mail, though a useful and essential addition to the FTP command repertoire, does not allow TIP users to send mail conveniently without using third hosts. It would be more convenient for TIP users to send mail over the TELNET connection instead of the data connection as provided by the 'MLFL' command. So that's why they added the MAIL command to FTP, later moved to MTP and then in SMTP split into MAIL, RCPT, and DATA, which still retains the terminating "CRLF.CRLF". https://gunkies.org/wiki/Terminal_Interface_Processor explains: > A Terminal Interface Processor (TIP, for short) was a customized IMP variant added to the ARPANET not too long after it was initially deployed. In addition to all the usual IMP functionality (including connection of host computers to the ARPANET), they also provided groups of serial lines to which could be attached terminals, which allowed users at the terminals access to the hosts attached to the ARPANET. > They were built on Honeywell 316 minicomputers, a later and un-ruggedized variant of the Honeywell 516 minicomputers used in the original IMPs. They used the TELNET protocol, running on top of NCP.

▲ lmm 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I had to use ed to configure X on my alpha/vms machine back when I had it, there was something wrong with the terminfo setup so visual editors didn't work, only line-based programs.

▲ jamesfinlayson 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Never had to use ed but I remember working with someone a fair bit older than me that remembered using ed.

▲ dboreham 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hmm. I still use ed now and then. It's an alias to vim I assume these days.

	▲	kragen 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No, vim doesn't implement ed, just ex.

▲ S04dKHzrKT 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Real Programmers use ed. https://xkcd.com/378/

	▲	duohedron 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Of course. Ed is the standard text editor. https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html