The first Unix I used was PC/ix on an XT. I don’t know it even had vi, but it had INed, which I assume was the ISC evolution of NED & Rand Editor. (I think I first started using vi on Xenix on an AT before I got my own RT??) Anyway, I had been very productive with half-duplex editing on 3270 on CMS up to that point, and INed seemed very natural to me. Totally unrelated to Unix, when I came to IBM Austin from Yorktown, real 3270s were scarce/shared. I got a DisplayWriter with a 3270 card and emulator in my office. That was better than a real 3270 to my tastes, even with the 8” diskettes. 3270 emulation on PC was ok, but not as good as the real thing, certainly not as good as the DW emulation. > On Sep 15, 2019, at 9:37 PM, Bakul Shah wrote: > > On Mon, 16 Sep 2019 12:05:24 +1000 George Michaelson wrote: >> The "block copy in an editor" thing is something which has intrigued >> me for years. poor old ed/ex/vi just couldn't do it, and for the life >> of me, I could not understand why this was "deprecated" by the people >> writing that family of editors. I seem to recall the various >> lightweight emacs which proceeded GNU had it, in some cases, and GNU >> had it. (Goslings emacs?) > > I think this is because vi grew out of ex which grew out of > ed, all of which were "line" editors, while the Rand Editor > (and the original NED) assumed a quarter plane model. e had > commands such as box (to draw a box), blank (or was it cut?) > to wipe out all nonblank chars from a rectangle, replace, > overlay (nonblank chars from the copy buffer overwrote data), > underlay (nonblank chars from the copy buffer didn't overwrite > nonblank chars) and so on. It even had justfy, fill and center > commands. It was basically an editor for producing documents > in monspaced fonts! -- voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer@technologists.com fax: +1.512.346.5240 web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ Facebook/Google/Skype/Twitter: CharlesHSauer