[Info-vax] TECO meta-discussion [was Re: Intel proposal to simplify x86-64]

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2023-06-07 21:34, Rich Alderson wrote:
> =?UTF-8?Q?Jan-Erik_S=c3=b6derholm?= <jan-erik.soderholm at telia.com> writes:
> 
>> I must ask (since I have never used TECO).
> 
>> What is the unique feature of TECO that cannot be done with some other
>> tool(s)?
> 
> The other responses to your question have most of it right.  I'm here to start
> a meta-discussion.
> 
> In the context of c.o.v., of course, there is only a single TECO, but that's
> not actually true.
> 
> The original (paper) Tape Editor and COrrector--TECO--was a program written by
> a user/customer for the PDP-1 systems at BBN and MIT.  That programmer later
> moved to DEC.
> 
> TECO was useful enough that it was reimplemented on later systems, both by DEC
> and by the MIT hackers.  DEC provided a nearly common set of commands for the
> PDP-8, PDP-11, and PDP-10 (running the Tops-10 operating system); at MIT, a
> separate implementation for the PDP-6 and PDP-10 running the ITS operating
> system was created.  (The VMS version grew out of the PDP-11 version, of course.)
> 
> One of the features of later TECO implementations is that they are Turing
> complete, sopeople wrote functions and complete programs to perform complex
> tasks; part of the Tops-10 installation procedure, for example, uses a TECO
> program to install user options into the operating system configuration prior
> to assembling the sources.
> 
> In the mid-1970s, a "real time editing" feature was created in the MIT version.
> This included the capability to assign compiled functions ("macros") to
> individual keystrokes; a number of people created libraries of such editing
> macros for their own use.  An enterprising junior hacker decided to collect all
> those libraries, resolve duplications, and make a general library that everyone
> could use.  The result was eventually named "EMACS", short for "Editing MACroS".
> 
> No other version of TECO has all the features of the MIT PDP-10 version, so no
> other TECO could host an EMACS.
> 
> Reimplementations of EMACS using Lisp dialects instead of TECO have come to be
> the norm.  Perhaps a Lisp implementation of VAX TECO would be of interest...

Not going to argue any part of this except that you can certainly do an 
EMACS in DEC TECO as well, but the original EMACS won't run on DEC TECO.

   Johnny