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For about 15 years I developed control systems for the Oil industry. All of my projects had ed built into their OS for cases when I had to telnet into them to d

by jecxjo 8y ago

For about 15 years I developed control systems for the Oil industry. All of my projects had ed built into their OS for cases when I had to telnet into them to do debugging and maintenance for clients. Most of our other projects relied on FTP as the only way to handle "offsite" file editing which often was too difficult to deal with as these devices lived in some of the most remote locations on earth with some of the crappiest network connections.

noobermin 8y ago
This is by far one of the coolest things I've read regarding remote maintenance. You must also be one of few modern users of `more` over `less`.
- jecxjo 8y ago
  It was kinda funny when I showed one of the VP's my setup. He had started the company in the 70's using minicomputers. ed was the editor he used to write code. So when I showed him that I was using it on our system he smiled and then questioned how old I was.
da_chicken 8y ago
This seems like one of the times when ed would be a legit editor of choice, rather than the other examples here which seem more like editors of last resort. ed was built for this kind of system where limited I/O was a requirement for reasonable performance. If transferring a file is too expensive, you can't wait for the system to redraw the entire screen of 25 lines and 80 columns because you scrolled past the bottom of the screen, either.
- jecxjo 8y ago
  As an example, one I often used for persuasion during sales, we had to dial into a location, which gave us access to a corporate network. From there it would VPN into an offsite office. From there I would connect with point to point radios 10 miles apart to a Gas rig running on solar panels. The radios had huge SNR numbers because they were near other commercial comm systems, high power power lines and were mounted on masts that would sway in the wind. To load up a 25x80 area would give me all sorts of bad characters. Doing single lines, and find and replace made it almost feel like I was right next to the hardware.

by jecxjo 8y ago

noobermin 8y ago

This is by far one of the coolest things I've read regarding remote maintenance. You must also be one of few modern users of `more` over `less`.

jecxjo 8y ago
It was kinda funny when I showed one of the VP's my setup. He had started the company in the 70's using minicomputers. ed was the editor he used to write code. So when I showed him that I was using it on our system he smiled and then questioned how old I was.

da_chicken 8y ago

This seems like one of the times when ed would be a legit editor of choice, rather than the other examples here which seem more like editors of last resort. ed was built for this kind of system where limited I/O was a requirement for reasonable performance. If transferring a file is too expensive, you can't wait for the system to redraw the entire screen of 25 lines and 80 columns because you scrolled past the bottom of the screen, either.

jecxjo 8y ago
As an example, one I often used for persuasion during sales, we had to dial into a location, which gave us access to a corporate network. From there it would VPN into an offsite office. From there I would connect with point to point radios 10 miles apart to a Gas rig running on solar panels. The radios had huge SNR numbers because they were near other commercial comm systems, high power power lines and were mounted on masts that would sway in the wind. To load up a 25x80 area would give me all sorts of bad characters. Doing single lines, and find and replace made it almost feel like I was right next to the hardware.