The very first text editor 3658

E is a special case, truly sui generis. WAITS, the SAIL OS, is a *VERY* heavily modified 4-series monitor. One of the modifications is the replacement of the standard Tops-10 command processor with the "line editor" which allows editing of the command line using control- and meta-key commands before hitting ENTER. E uses the "line editor" for text input; the control and meta keys on the SAIL keyboards (12-bit character codes, with Control=200 and Meta=400, and Top and Shift as further bucky bits) inspired their use at MIT in EMACS.

Coursewriter III was a computer-buttisted-instruction environment from IBM. The original Coursewriter ran on the 1401, and Coursewriter II ran on a modified 1800 (a process-control architecture kind of like the DEC 18-bit line); CW3 ran on the 360 family.

It had two basic modes of operation, "author" and "student". In author mode, you could enter blocks of text (with a prefixed command) to be presented to the student, either just to be read, or as preface to a series of questions. This was my first encounter with on-line, interactive text entry of any kind; as a lab supervisor I could do author-mode stuff, and used it to experiment with writing. I did quite a bit more of that for a while at Ohio State, but it was less fun there because of the different kind of terminals they had, plus I had started to see the difference between fixed-pitch and variable-pitch styles of text as more than just a nuisance.

It was a really primitive line editor; at this remove I can't even recall whether it allowed changes within a line, or required the author to re-type an entire line to correct a mistake. (I'm sure it must have allowed it, I simply don't remember.) It did not number lines except relatively with respect to labels (so easy to learn for an buttembler-language programmer!)

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