Quote (from memory) from Rob Pike, a few years before he wrote the editor "sam": "Everybody writes a screen editor. It's easy to do and makes them feel important. Tell them to work on something useful".
This was not long after he had left Caltech, where he had been a system admin/system programmer for CITHEP (Caltech High Energy Physics), for Bell Labs. CITHEP hired a few undergraduates as the new admins and system programmers. I was one of those undergraduates.
Most of us used the line-oriented editor QED, but as programmers were wont to do in the early '80s, said that someday we were going to write ourselves awesome screen editors.
One evening, Karl Heuer and I were both boasting about how great our screen editors would be, and it somehow turned into an editor writing throw down. We took terminals at opposite sides of the room, and both started hacking away, designing as we coded.
This continued all night, mostly in silence, with the occasional boast ("I've got text search working!") and counter-boast ("I had that an hour ago--I'm doing regular expressions now!"), and frequent trips downstairs to the vending machines for soda and snacks.
Another of the undergraduate system admin/programmers, Norman Wilson, then arrived, and saw what Karl and I had been doing all night. He sent an email to Pike about it, and the quote at the start was Pike's reply.
This was not long after he had left Caltech, where he had been a system admin/system programmer for CITHEP (Caltech High Energy Physics), for Bell Labs. CITHEP hired a few undergraduates as the new admins and system programmers. I was one of those undergraduates.
Most of us used the line-oriented editor QED, but as programmers were wont to do in the early '80s, said that someday we were going to write ourselves awesome screen editors.
One evening, Karl Heuer and I were both boasting about how great our screen editors would be, and it somehow turned into an editor writing throw down. We took terminals at opposite sides of the room, and both started hacking away, designing as we coded.
This continued all night, mostly in silence, with the occasional boast ("I've got text search working!") and counter-boast ("I had that an hour ago--I'm doing regular expressions now!"), and frequent trips downstairs to the vending machines for soda and snacks.
Another of the undergraduate system admin/programmers, Norman Wilson, then arrived, and saw what Karl and I had been doing all night. He sent an email to Pike about it, and the quote at the start was Pike's reply.