[Info-vax] x86 Update 4/22/19

[George Cornelius]

In article <giqpriFn6aiU1 at mid.individual.net>, Bill Gunshannon <bill.gunshannon at gmail.com> writes:
> On 4/29/19 11:25 PM, George Cornelius wrote:

>> Had not heard of EDT being VESTed.  It was in Bliss, after all.
>> 
>> PITA on the PDP-11, though, because it was developed in Bliss-36
>> and then shoehorned into 16-bit address space via a pile of ODL
>> (overlay description language).  Much more reasonable if you had
>> 11M+ with separated I and D space and memory resident overlays.
> 
> I assume you mean building it because I never found using it
> on a PDP-11 to be a PITA.  I like it.

Yes, I believe you could build a custom EDT depending on how tight
you were on memory.  As I recall, under RSX-11M (but not M+) you
could actually still build the O/S to run without memory management
so might have to operate in very small partitions.
 
> But, by the time I started using VMS there was EVE and TPU so I
> really didn't use EDT much on the VAX.
> 
> Just out of curiosity, did the version that eventually made it to
> VMS have "NOKEYPAD MODE"?

That was the difference between EDT v1 and v2.  I learned on
v1 [*], and when v2 came along learned to use the keypad
editing functions.  Under NOKEYPAD it was a bit like Teco in
that the edit commands were single character and showed up on
a line by themselves below the screen area.  NOKEYPAD mode is
what you are ordinarily using when you make a macro that you
will be assigning to a key of your choice via <CTRL/K>.

When v2 arrived was the time we started noticing that EDT
no longer comfortably fit into a 16-bit address space.

George

 [*] I already knew EDT when I went to Bedford to
 take the PDP-11 Programmer and Advanced Programmer
 classes, but they were teaching the use of the
 relatively crude EDI line editor, which was a bit
 like Teco in that it was designed with an editing
 buffer which for the most part could only move
 forward within the file. Its primary redeeming
 characteristic was that it could edit arbitrarily
 large files.

> 
> bill
>