On 7/20/2022 10:16 AM, Joe Zeff wrote:
On 7/20/22 07:45, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
We couldn't even run vi at the time on our PDP-11/45 with 6th Edition UNIX. IIRC it was too big for the address space. I wrote my PhD thesis in Nroff using George Coulouris' em ('editor for mortals'), the precursor to ex, which eventually became vi. It had a single-line display but unlike ed you could see what you were doing.
And because you had to do that decades ago new Linux users today should be using vi instead of all the more user friendly editors available for use in a terminal?
Careful there- even today, a very large number of new Linux devices don't run a GUI at all, so a text-based editor (and knowing how to drive it) is a necessity.
Also, I think you mean 'shell' instead of 'terminal'- a 'terminal' is an external piece of hardware that terminates a serial line, like an ADM-3A or TVI-912C, etc. We generally haven't used terminals since the 1980's.
;)