TECO (was: As I remember things)

[Rich Thomson <rthomson@ptc.com>]

In article <B16E057D-3240@157.57.6.88> ,
    "Ed Tecot" <tecot@cs.stanford.edu>  writes:
> I particularly remember the time that a Delphi client got confused and
> asked if a particular problem could be solved with a "Tecot file".  In
> fact, I'm kind of surprised that no one's mentioned TECO so far - writing
> clever one-line programs in TECO was a favorite activity of mine.  We
> certainly had some nifty TECO programs by 1981.

Oh, its slipped out here in there in a few messages.  I have a copy of
TECO release notes and user documentation in my collection, as
apparently does Jim Stallings.

Gary Luckenbaugh had written a little number game in TECO (I still
can't remember exactly what game it was... reversi? or perhaps a
Mastermind type game?).  At any rate, I do remember that was one of
the consummate TECO hacks.  I myself hacked a bit of TECO, although
I'm at a loss in remembering what exactly I hacked!

I do remember how we talked about TECOisms -- "H T 'scape 'scape" and
all that.  I also remember seeing the ancestor of emacs (which I use
every day at work and at home for writing code), the "visual" mode
macros that only worked for VT52 terminals.  I remember at one point
DELTA had a single VT52, whose ^G noise is described in the hacker's
dictionary as sounding like the grinding of gears on an old automobile.
I used the visual mode TECO on that just to see what it looked like.
Its hard to imagine what the original emacs (short for editor macros)
would have looked like, but apparently emacs was entirely inspired by
the hacker's love of TECO.
--
                                               Rich Thomson
                                               rthomson@ptc.com