Where should the type information be 344

It's possible that that was mine, although I did it at the University of Alberta, not the University of Arizona. We had a new fancy smart terminal hooked up to the PDP-11-45 running Unix (U of A had a very early Unix licence because of Prof. Tony Marsland's ties to Ken Thomson via computer chess). I got full editing to work, but, if memory serves me right, it wasn't too reliable. Either the terminal or the 11's serial port didn't do flow control too well, and stuff got lost (or maybe even the early Unix driver - the terminal was doing a full screen dump to it at 9600 bps). Anyway, we did hear a bit of interest in it from Bill Joy, but I don't think it was general enough for what he wanted.

Now, doing that may sound like a nice "pattern", but really it was just me thinking "gee, I can make this cool new editor without having to write all the hard buffer and file management stuff - just let 'ed' do it". I think this was in the early-to-mid 1970's, way before "programming with patterns" was invented.

-- Experience should guide us, not rule us.