TECO - The text editor from hell (on which Emacs was based on) | Hacker News Reader

TECO - The text editor from hell (on which Emacs was based on)

almy.us

29 pointsudzinari12 comments

If someone cites some of your programming work 50 years after you finished working on it then you must have done something right.

From what I have heard from my father and others, editing punch cards was hell itself. The fact that TECO managed to bridge the punch card and hard disk storage eras could be viewed as some sort of miracle.

On another note, it it seems that Dan Murphy, who created TECO at DEC in 1962 - 1963, is still going strong. In 2009 The IEEE Annals of Computing History published this article authored by him (warning: pdf): http://tenex.opost.com/anhc-31-4-anec.pdf and earlier this year he updated his personal website: http://www.opost.com/dlm/

There's even a 64-bit, working distribution (with binary if you trust it) for OS X: http://almy.us/teco.html

I am running it, with the list of commands open, and I have no idea how to use it but I see that it comes with a complete manual, and introduction, and a list of commands.

And I had one of those "what in the world am I doing?" moments. Seriously. I have code that actually excites me that I'm writing and is coming along well, and I'm learning TECO?

I'm coming back to it later, though, because it's a fun salute to a great guy, and because using a punch-card-oriented editor for any task today would amuse me immensely.

At work the other day someone showed me a pad of punch card keying order forms where you would fill them out and send them out to get punched. They even say "University of California Form xxxxxx" printed on the bottom of every page on the pad. He says when he stared in the 70s they had just stopped using punch cards.

When I went to high school the cards were sorted manually. On our first day of school we were given a stack of IBM cards, punched with our student information. We would give one to each teacher when we reported to our first class. At the end of the day, the teacher would have a stack of cards for each of her classes. All these cards were sent somewhere (my school didn't have a computer), sorted.

"DO NOT FOLD SPINDLE OR MUTILATE"

> ... on which Emacs was based on ...

In grammar, this is like wearing both suspenders and a belt.

I am probably the only person here who learned to program in TeCO. It is indeed a Turing complete language. I'd done a few classes with Algol-60, Lisp, and PL/1, but there was an available PDP-11/05 at TMRC, and later an 11/03 at MITERS, and I started playing. A year later I'd written a significant body of code (none of which I remember at all), and flunked out of school.

Tech Model Railroad Club. Google it. MIT Electronic Research Society. Sort of a prehistoric maker space.

Compared to the alternatives at the time, TECO was great for programming on the PDP-10 using a Datapoint video display terminal (text mode only). Michael Yoder, Putnam Fellow 1971 and 1972, wrote a Turing machine in TECO back then.

Well, Ed is the standard text editor...

(for those not in the know -- http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html)

Agreed. But to be fair it is still useful to fix a single issue in a huge file.

or when your machine won't boot into a display that can run vi and you need to edit some file to get the machine to boot up.

There is a BSD port for TECO as well. I'm running it on a PPC Mac via Macports.

wow, archeoware... put it on github pls!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com