
TECO - The text editor from hell (on which Emacs was based on) - udzinari
http://almy.us/teco.html
======
phon
If someone cites some of your programming work 50 years after you finished
working on it then you must have done something right.

From what I have heard from my father and others, editing punch cards was hell
itself. The fact that TECO managed to bridge the punch card and hard disk
storage eras could be viewed as some sort of miracle.

On another note, it it seems that Dan Murphy, who created TECO at DEC in 1962
- 1963, is still going strong. In 2009 The IEEE Annals of Computing History
published this article authored by him (warning: pdf):
<http://tenex.opost.com/anhc-31-4-anec.pdf> and earlier this year he updated
his personal website: <http://www.opost.com/dlm/>

------
mr_luc
There's even a 64-bit, working distribution (with binary if you trust it) for
OS X: <http://almy.us/teco.html>

I am running it, with the list of commands open, and I have no idea how to use
it but I see that it comes with a complete manual, and introduction, and a
list of commands.

And I had one of those "what in the world am I doing?" moments. Seriously. I
have code that actually excites me that I'm writing and is coming along well,
and I'm learning TECO?

I'm coming back to it later, though, because it's a fun salute to a great guy,
and because using a punch-card-oriented editor for _any_ task today would
amuse me immensely.

~~~
tingletech
At work the other day someone showed me a pad of punch card keying order forms
where you would fill them out and send them out to get punched. They even say
"University of California Form xxxxxx" printed on the bottom of every page on
the pad. He says when he stared in the 70s they had just stopped using punch
cards.

~~~
KC8ZKF
When I went to high school the cards were sorted manually. On our first day of
school we were given a stack of IBM cards, punched with our student
information. We would give one to each teacher when we reported to our first
class. At the end of the day, the teacher would have a stack of cards for each
of her classes. All these cards were sent somewhere (my school didn't have a
computer), sorted.

"DO NOT FOLD SPINDLE OR MUTILATE"

------
lutusp
> ... on which Emacs was based on ...

In grammar, this is like wearing both suspenders and a belt.

------
kbob
I am probably the only person here who learned to program in TeCO. It is
indeed a Turing complete language. I'd done a few classes with Algol-60, Lisp,
and PL/1, but there was an available PDP-11/05 at TMRC _, and later an 11/03
at MITERS_ _, and I started playing. A year later I'd written a significant
body of code (none of which I remember at all), and flunked out of school.

_ Tech Model Railroad Club. Google it. __MIT Electronic Research Society. Sort
of a prehistoric maker space.

------
lesterbuck
Compared to the alternatives at the time, TECO was great for programming on
the PDP-10 using a Datapoint video display terminal (text mode only). Michael
Yoder, Putnam Fellow 1971 and 1972, wrote a Turing machine in TECO back then.

------
jballanc
Well, Ed is the standard text editor...

(for those not in the know -- <http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html>)

~~~
tomjen3
Agreed. But to be fair it is still useful to fix a single issue in a huge
file.

~~~
tingletech
or when your machine won't boot into a display that can run vi and you need to
edit some file to get the machine to boot up.

------
KC8ZKF
There is a BSD port for TECO as well. I'm running it on a PPC Mac via
Macports.

------
diminish
wow, archeoware... put it on github pls!

