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

[Scott Dorsey]

Galen  <gltackett at gmail.com> wrote:
>I remember. At least two editors for NOS. One was line oriented and the oth=
>er screen oriented. My department st Lockheed in Sunnyvale used half duplex=
> terminal connections, causing  the editor command keys to get echoed on to=
>p of your text, so you were constantly hitting Refresh to make it look righ=
>t again. Was that editor called FME? Can=E2=80=99t remember for certain. If=
> I have the acronym right, I think it stood for Forms Mode Editor.

The editor was called FSE, the Full-Screen Editor.  Part of the problem was
that the I/O on the Cyber was line-oriented and nothing would get passed
from the PPU to the CPU until you hit return.  So you could enter editing
commands and see stuff on the screen change and the PPU takes care of all
that stuff, and then you hit return and the CPU's image of the file is updated
to match the PPU's and sometimes things went wrong.

It was truly horrible, but given the architecture of the machine it was a
miracle that it worked at all.

Years later there was an attempt to put Unix to the Cyber 180 archiecture
so that CDC could bid for POSIX-requiring government contracts.  VE/VX was
interesting but things like vi were nightmarish (and much of the vi clone
ran directly on the PPU).  You'd type *EOI instead of ctrl-D....
--scott


-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."