The very first text editor 3693

Hmm. I did, didn't I? 1984 is one of the most masterful exploitations of irony in modern literature.

What I meant about not waiting for the critics, is that the machine is your sternest and fairest critic. And it feeds you your pellet as soon as you run the maze correctly. When I was a brat, I got far more of a hug from a PDP-8 when I independently re-invented a binary sort than I ever got from any examiner giving me an A. What was worse, was getting an A for something that was rubbish. It made me understand that the school was no good and I was wasting my time going to lectures.

Speaking of DECnet, some of the code I nicked from early DECnet was clearly something that was written first and 'designed' afterward. (Stu Wecker's table look up CRC algorithm. It was so fast that it outperformed the KG11 hardware CRC option by a country mile). It was so good that my boss thought I was brilliant just for nicking it. How's that for reflected glory? And typical pointy-haired critic behaviour too.

The point of that digression was that Stu needed to be a damn good low level programmer before he could hold his own in all those meetings of the critics as they sat round designing DDCMP ;-) So once again, what could be fairer than 1s and 0s?