Re: [TUHS] Old screen editors

[Ralph Corderoy <ralph@inputplus.co.uk>]

Hi Lawrence,

> At some point we got ex/vi, but before that we got the “Rand Editor”
> re, which was a perfectly functional screen editor, if you squinted a
> bit.
>
> Does anyone here know the place of re in the history?

RAND's re from 1974 had become Ned, for New Editor by 1977 when Ned's
author, Walt Bilofsky, later founder of The Software Toolworks, wrote
RAND report R2176.  https://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R2176.html

        Over the past few years Ned, a text editor utilizing the full
    capabilities of the CRT display, has been under development and in
    use at The Rand Corporation...

        The Ned editor runs on the PDP-11 series of computers under
    the UNIX operating system.  It uses a CRT display to provide a
    two-dimensional window into a text file...  ...rectangular portions of
    text may be opened, deleted, and moved about...  The set of operations
    may be expanded by user-provided or system-provided text-processing
    programs...  The screen may be divided into several editing windows...

Chapter 3 has the history of IDA-CRD → Yale Editor ‘E’ → RAND
editor ‘re’ → Ned.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.