The very first text editor 3656

... from long ago and far away ...

Lynn,

After seeing some of the RED-XEDIT dialogue between you and lovelove, I thought I would express my point of view as one who used to use WED, switched to RED, became fond of RED, then switched happily to XEDIT. (WED is known here as simply EDIT, and RED is known not so simply as RALEDIT, in case I slip up on my names.) First let me say that I am comparing the versions currently available on the VM system disks at yyyyyy and restricting myself to a few technical issues. You are certainly right that RED would be better if it had had the benefit of a couple more years of usage-debugging-refinement. However, I am not now convinced I would prefer RED even if it had had this benefit. Second, if I were to compare the current yyyyyy versions in terms of freedom from errors I've observed and significance of the errors, I would cite WED as essentially error free, RED as having a few mysterious and quite serious errors and a number of frustrating inconsistencies and XEDIT being closer to WED than RED but not what it should be. More than once a week RED used to leave me stuck in CP and-or get stuck in a loop that forced me to abort it until I recognized command-subcommand sequences that had to be avoided. Backtracking a bit, I came to Yorktown in '75, a fresh Ph.D. from Texas at Austin, with no experience on IBM machines except some minimal experiences via punched cards and JCL. I learned to use WED without having much more than a hint that it was not the plain CMS EDIT. After my experiences with the primitive editor and command language on the CDC 6400 at U.T., CMS and WED seemed just great. In '77 I decided that even the benefits of my position here (I'm not being facetious) were not worth living in Westchester and went back to be a prof. at U.T., on leave of absence from IBM. Though most of the people there seemed relatively content with the DEC-10 that had come to dominate the 6400, both the command language (local version of TOPS-10) and the editors (DEC's TECO and Arizona's SOS) were pretty discouraging to me after enjoying CMS and WED. In '79 I decided the benefits of my position here were worth living in Westchester, much as I would rather live in Austin. Though at first when I came back I used WED, as soon as I discovered RED I switched to it. I was very happy with its improvements, especially, but not limited to, the full screen capability and the string-pattern matching facility. I endured its errors and inconsistencies because I was able to work more efficiently in spite of these.

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