From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npois!ucbvax!C70:editor-people Newsgroups: fa.editor-p Title: Z really works - experience Article-I.D.: ucb.1315 Posted: Thu Jun 10 01:52:32 1982 Received: Fri Jun 11 01:08:54 1982 Reply-To: ople >From Mishkin@YALE Thu Jun 10 01:46:36 1982 Date: 3 Jun 1982 1143-EDT From: John R. Levine, The INTERACTIVE Electric Calculator Co., Cambridge MA. Sender: johnl at IMA Subject: Z really works - experience Just to reassure the people who had bad experience with Yale editors a long time ago, yes the old E editor for the PDP-10 was an awful program but the new Z editor really works. I'm one of the few people left who has used both extensively. The old E editor was written in 1971 for a KA10 and Sugarman terminals, because they were cheap and that was all we had or expected to get soon. As far as I can tell, Yale was the only place that ever bought that particular model of Sugarman. The editor was about the first PDP-10 code that the guys who wrote it ever wrote, and you can tell. No useful comments at all, for example. At the time, the Yale department actually turned down a chance to be on the Arpanet because the senior member of the department thought that networking was a big waste of time. (He was right, of course; look how much time we all spend sending and reading this junk mail.) Thus Yale's isolation and original awful editor. The main thing that can be said in defense of E was that it was small and fast, which was important on a 192K KA-10. Z comes from a more mature environment and from ten more years of experience. There are multiple terminal types and multiple Twenexes at Yale, and the person who wrote most of Z (Steve Wood) is a far more careful software developer than were the E authors when they wrote it. People with any interest in editors at all and access to a DEC-20 owe it to themselves to try Z, if only to come up with informed reasons that they don't like it. I personally like Z a lot, both because it is an editor style that I like and because on a moderately loaded 20 it responds faster than other editors. John Levine (Levine @ YALE, or decvax!cca!ima!johnl) P.S.: Many of the original Rand editor people later went off to form Interactive Systems in Santa Monica. They (Ned Irons in particular) attacked the sluggish response problems that plague screen editors by putting as much as possible of the editor in the terminal. That project was surprisingly successful and the second generation smart terminal is now a regular Interactive product. It really works and speeds up editing response immeasurably. An added advantage is that all messages between the terminal and the host are encoded as lines of printing characters so that you can use a real screen editor even if the transmission medium or remote computer is line at a time, e.g. Telenet. If there is interest I can say more about Interactive's editor and editing terminals. -------