vekelly09

Speaking of... By 1978 InterLISP had grown up quite a bit and its tree-based editor was quite powerful. It supported several tools like Masterscope and DWIM (Do What I Mean), the likes of which I would not see in text-based editors for almost two decades. It was quite habitable, even though a CLI tool and tree-based. I wrote all the code for my dissertation using that editor on a DEC-20. So much better than even EMACS at the time. The simplicity of S-expressions was critical to its success, IMHO. Extending the editor was simple, too. LISP, you know.

I remember it well. All of us computer hackers back in the late 1970s did something like that with a bunch of solenoids. It worked, but you got about 12 cps on a good day, and only constant width fonts. Also, if one of your solenoids was a bit sluggish it would throw off the registration of some of the characters. The advent of daisy wheel technology killed off the Selectric printers. Remember daisy wheels, especially the early metal ones??

OTOH hacking an IBM Executive might have been something. Proportional spacing!! (but a much fiddlier mechanism)