On Mon, Mar 4, 2024 at 3:27 PM Lars Brinkhoff <lars@nocrew.org> wrote:

>
>
> I'd like expand on this, since I never heard about STOPGAP or SOS on the MIT
> PDP-6/10 computers.

Hmm, you are undoubtedly right.  STOPGAP and SOS might just have been at
DECisms.

I initially used SOS on the CMU PDP-10s to prep BLISS, Macro-10, and SAIL
for a small job I got.  It was the most like the editor used on
other job on the Computere Center's TSS system (whose name I forget, which
I learned first).  I wanted to get stuff done, not learn a new editor, so
that was fine.  It also worked on VMS 1.0, IIRC, as I had a job moving some
BLISS-10 code to BLISS32 on the first Vax.  At some point, I was shown TECO
and EMACS on the PDP-10s, but I had started to work on PDP-11 UNIX by then,
and ed(1) was all that was on V5. At the time, learning something fancier
for the PDP-10 seemed like a wrong time investment since I was not getting
paid to work on that system, and I was getting paid to hack on UNIX.

Truth be known, as a UNIX person, I got pretty adept with ed, so even when
vi mode of ex showed up a few years later, I was actually slow to bother.

Any the CMU SOS doc I have says STOPGAP was DEC/MIT-ism but I bet that's
wrong -- it was probably just DEC.

Jargon file says: *SOS n.,obs. /S-O-S/ 1. An infamously {losing} text
editor. Once, back in the 1960s, when a text editor was needed for the
PDP-6, a hacker crufted together a {quick-and-dirty} `stopgap editor' to be
used until a better one was written. Unfortunately, the old one was never
really discarded when new ones (in particular, {TECO}) came along. SOS is a
descendant (`Son of Stopgap') of that editor, and many PDP-10 users gained
the dubious pleasure of its acquaintance. Since then other programs similar
in style to SOS have been written, notably the early font editor BILOS
/bye'lohs/, the Brother-In-Law Of Stopgap (the alternate expansion `Bastard
Issue, Loins of Stopgap' has been proposed). 2. /sos/ n. To decrease;
inverse of {AOS}, from the PDP-10 instruction set.*




> TECO was ported over to the 6 only a few weeks after delivers, and that
> seems to have been the major editor ever since.
> Did you think of the SAIL PDP-6?
>
Maybe. I don't know.
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