3 ms·
If you know vi, you pretty much know ed, as this jokey article glancingly points out. There is a bug in the article: i" vi(1) does offer a distinctly visual in
by gumby 3y ago
If you know vi, you pretty much know ed, as this jokey article glancingly points out.
There is a bug in the article: i" vi(1) does offer a distinctly visual interface that only became possible with the advent of the video terminal, affectionately known as the glass teletype."
The term "glass teletype" was coined specifically once there were terminals with addressable displays (that is, your program could place a character at any character position on the display at location X,Y). Until then displays drew at the bottom of the screen and scrolled the entire display upwards when receiving a line feed. Basically like a teletype!
The blog author has a white beard so could potentially be old enough to remember those days, but also is in Norway so the slang could have been shorn of its roots in the process of crossing the Atlantic.
- bluGill 3y agoNot just teletypes. Most BBS systems (1980s) didn't have a good way to control the remote screen and so they ended up acting like they were printing to paper despite having a full terminal on the other end. I did use a teletype in the early 1990s to call a BBS (via acoustic coupler) - when lightening took out my computer. Other than the waste of paper is worked just fine. Unfortunately none of them provided an editor near as good as ed - but as a kid I didn't know what I was missing. I've also had to configure equipment that only provided a serial port. Some let me configure TERM, but others did not. Either way I knew ed and so figuring out how to configure TERM wasn't worth the bother for quick changes. Even in the late 1990s, computers were sometimes slow enough that for quick changes I could open ed and make the change faster than vi could load. Don't get me started on loading emacs on those (which most people did and probably why ed was faster)