Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

They missed the RAND editor.[1] This was a full-screen editor of the late 1970s, years before "vi". It was originally designed for a specific HP terminal [2], one which had programmable function keys, and there was a little plastic overlay to place around the function keys indicating what they did. Later, there was a custom terminal with built-in keys for the editor functions. Expecting users to remember control sequences was considered unacceptable.

The RAND editor wasn't free. We had a site license for it at an aerospace company, so it was on all the UNIX systems. It was not used widely outside aerospace and DoD. "vi" was an attempt to do roughly the same job without the special hardware.

[1] http://www.rand.org/pubs/notes/N2239-1.html [2] http://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/HP_2645A

Cool! It makes me sad that history like this will be lost when the first generation of coders turns to dust.

Before an hour ago you were one of the only people in the world to know this little bit of history, and the fact would have probably died with you.

It's not lost. There's the RAND paper mentioned above. The code is on Github.[1] It runs on Linux now.

[1] https://github.com/blakemcbride/Rand-E-Editor

Github is a treasure trove of awesome.

Maybe they felt there was no known or documented relationship between that editor and vi. Then again, they missed Bravo (which ran on the Alto) and Bill Joy has talked about its influence specifically.

Bravo is completely different. It's mouse-oriented, with proportional spacing and multiple fonts. It's the ancestor of Microsoft Word. Charles Simonyi worked on both Bravo and Word.

You can use Bravo as a programmer's editor, because the file format is plain ASCII followed by a control-Z, then formatting information. Alto compilers read the plain text part and stop at control-Z.

Mouse aside, Bravo isn't in here because its command set doesn't feel like an ancestor or a child of any of these other editors.

For example it uses G (for Get) to load files and P (for Put) to save them, instead of r (for read) and w (for write) like the ed family does.

(Whereas Sam for Plan 9 uses the mouse like Bravo does, but applies ed-like commands to the mouse selection.)

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