Hi Steve,

> With the advent of glass teletypes, [editor] scripts simply evaporated
> -- there was no equivalent.  (yes, there were programs like sed, but
> it wasn't the same...).  Changing, e.g., a function name oin 10 files
> got a lot more tedious.

I still write the odd editor script.  I interact with ed every day; it's
handy when the information for the edit is on the TTY from previous
commands and you just want to get in, edit, and w, q.

A shell script and ed script I use a lot is ~/bin/rcsanno, a `blame' for
RCS files that I have dotted about.  RCS because SCCS wasn't available
back before CSSC came along.

I runs through each revision on the path I'm interested in, e.g. 1.1 to
the latest 1.42.  It starts with 1.1, but with `1,1:' prepended to each
line.  For 1.2 onwards it does an rcsdiff(1) with `-e': produce an ed
script.  This is piped into a brief bit of awk that munges the ed script
to prepend the revision to any added or changed line, and then it's fed
into ed.  Thus the `1.2' that's created has all lines match /^1\.[12]:/.
And so on up to 1.42.  It's not the quickest way compared to
interpreting the RCS `,v' file, but it required no insight into that
file format and is `good enough'.

I suspect a more interesting question is what did Unix adopt from other
OSes that it would have been better without!  :-)

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy