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Mixtel90

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Joined: 05/10/2019
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 8769

Posted: 12:12pm 20 Apr 2026

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Quite correct. edlin was quite likely the vilest piece of c*** to ever appear in an OS. One of the best forgotten bits of MSDOS. vi (linux) was definitely better, and vim more so.

A full Emacs (or GNU EMACS as it used to be) has, supposedly, over 10,000 built-in commands. It's what we used to call Topsy software (named after the little girl from "Uncle Tom's Cabin" who "just growed and growed").

Mick

Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini
Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs

bfwolf
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Joined: 03/01/2025
Location: Germany
Posts: 235

Posted: 12:44pm 20 Apr 2026

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Mixtel90 said A full Emacs (or GNU EMACS as it used to be) has, supposedly, over 10,000 built-in commands. It's what we used to call Topsy software (named after the little girl from "Uncle Tom's Cabin" who "just growed and growed").

Many "detractors" have claimed that "emacs" is a Lisp interpreter with a large vocabulary and a handful of text editing functions.

bfwolf

JohnS
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Joined: 18/11/2011
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 4304

Posted: 01:05pm 20 Apr 2026

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I think edlin was indeed DOS not UNIX or Linux.

Under Sixth Edition UNIX there was just the entirely text-oriented ed, but back then almost no-one had any kind of screen let alone a graphics one. An ASR33 TeleType was rather painful - but way better than a deck of punched cards.

Anyone for TECO?

John

fred777
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Joined: 01/07/2021
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 67

Posted: 02:35pm 20 Apr 2026

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As we're going back in Time, here is my Editor TOP3:

ISPF/Edit
ROSCOE/AWS
XEDIT VM/CMS

All Mainframe Stuff...and the first one is the one I'm now trying to recreacte on the Picomite :-)

lizby
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Joined: 17/05/2016
Location: United States
Posts: 3742

Posted: 02:52pm 20 Apr 2026

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bfwolf said This is roughly what I expected from AI without detailed algorithm specifications: It's first-year programming!

Exactly: "without detailed algorithm specifications". As Peter has amply shown, with those detailed algorithm specifications, AI can produce very fine-tuned code. I wanted to see what could be thrown together with minimal guidance.

FWIW, I asked Gemini to write a python program to count my Picomite .bas files with more and less than 300 lines:

Quote python \dl\ai\python\count_bas_lines.py
----------------------------------------
Total .bas files analyzed: 120
----------------------------------------
300 lines or fewer : 87 (72.5%)
More than 300 lines: 33 (27.5%)
----------------------------------------

(But I don't ever expect to use vi to edit MMBasic programs.)

PicoMite, Armmite F4, SensorKits, MMBasic Hardware, Games, etc. on FOTS

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