[ih] cut and paste

[Guy Almes]

Jack et al.,
   This thread is extremely interesting.
   I was a 1970s era CS grad student at CMU.
   A number of my cohort (not me) were both (a) from the Boston area and 
(b) headed to Palo Alto.
   On our TOPS-10 system, we had a choice of text editors: either TECO 
or a Stanford editor called SOS.  I quickly decided that TECO was too 
complicated for a text editor and didn't take its "programming language 
and runtime environment" as a (positive) feature.  And SOS was fine.

   But, stepping back, I was amused that an early comment in this thread 
assumed that cut/paste originated with the Alto.  I didn't have to wait 
too long for folks to point to EMACS and TECO.
   Given the historical shift in the 'center of gravity' of the computer 
industry from the northeast to Silicon Valley, and given the many good 
reasons to admire the innovations from Si Valley, we sometimes forget 
the richness of the DEC / EMACS / ARPAnet / etc. world that predates the 
equally wonderful Xerox PARC etc. world.
   Being neither 'from New England' nor ever having headed 'to Si 
Valley', I don't have a dog in this hunt.
   But there are so many things about about the techno-culture of the 
Boston area computer culture that modern folks don't fully appreciate.

   I wonder whether the Unix culture (referring to the vi editor) is 
sort of a third 'New Jersey' locus.

   One last comment: while at the Univ of Washington CS department, 
there was a wonderful colleague from the Classics department named 
Pierre MacKay.  He wasn't a techie (by background), but was (like many 
classics folks) bright as hell.
   He was studying some ancient Greek texts where the earliest sources 
are actually Arabic translations (though originally in Greek, the 
earliest actual Greek sources for these texts are back-translations from 
Arabic).  So, in his research, he wrote monographs on this literature 
and the monographs had to have type-set Arabic.  Before the mid-1970s, 
this just involved mailing the manuscript Arabic to typesetting 
companies in Beirut, and they would come back with beautiful results. 
This all fell apart, sadly, during the Lebanese civil war.
   So MacKay set about learning how to program computers and wrote an 
Arabic type-setting system.
   Being smart and unafraid of complicated arcane languages, he chose to 
use (you guessed it) TECO as his programming language of choice.
   Having succeeded in its use in his research, he offered a "computer 
programming for the humanities" course in which TECO was the primary 
language.

	-- Guy

On 8/7/23 7:01 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> AFAIK, vi was independent of TECO.  TECO started on the DEC PDP-1 in the
> early 60s.  Unix and vi came along more than a decade later IIRC.  But
> it's certainly likely that the implementors of vi had used TECO before
> or were at least aware of it.  At its beginnings, TECO was often used to
> edit programs on paper tape (!) with a printing terminal.
> 
> TECO was ostensibly an editor, but in reality it was a programming
> language and runtime environment.   I recall that somene actually wrote
> a timesharing system, in TECO macros, just as a hack.
> 
> FYI, here's the commands, circa 1976:
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/ai_600dpi/TECO_V508_Nov1976.pdf__;!!KwNVnqRv!BIZP2_MK2KVXArPvq6oQH6NlwtxsXKKTyXQ9Qb7gOn7XUtw_t7x9Mlvkil43YKdh7qDNtZrnVNAERJFdkqdozBwdMUHX_A$  <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/ai_600dpi/TECO_V508_Nov1976.pdf__;!!KwNVnqRv!BIZP2_MK2KVXArPvq6oQH6NlwtxsXKKTyXQ9Qb7gOn7XUtw_t7x9Mlvkil43YKdh7qDNtZrnVNAERJFdkqdozBwdMUHX_A$>
> 
> Jack
> 
> 
> On 8/7/23 15:47, Michael Thomas via Internet-history wrote:
>>
>> On 8/7/23 3:36 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
>>> TECO, circa 1970, had a notion of "QRegisters", which were places you 
>>> could put some text and later insert it into your document 
>>> elsewhere.  TECO used single-letter commands, which you could string 
>>> together to perform complex actions. See 
>>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://tenex.opost.com/anhc-31-4-anec.pdf__;!!KwNVnqRv!BIZP2_MK2KVXArPvq6oQH6NlwtxsXKKTyXQ9Qb7gOn7XUtw_t7x9Mlvkil43YKdh7qDNtZrnVNAERJFdkqdozBwlC1Xn4A$  <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://tenex.opost.com/anhc-31-4-anec.pdf__;!!KwNVnqRv!BIZP2_MK2KVXArPvq6oQH6NlwtxsXKKTyXQ9Qb7gOn7XUtw_t7x9Mlvkil43YKdh7qDNtZrnVNAERJFdkqdozBwlC1Xn4A$>
>>>
>>> E.G., "hxa" would put the entire contents of your file into QRegister 
>>> "a"; the "h" is shorthand for "0,z" which specifies everything from 
>>> character0 through the last character (z).   The "x" is the actual 
>>> command top copy text into the specified QRegister. The command "ga" 
>>> would "get" the contents of QRegister "a" and insert it into your 
>>> text at the current cursor location.
>>>
>>> So, "cut and paste" were in use in 1970 and probably earlier. I don't 
>>> recall the terms "cut and paste" being used, and the TECO commands 
>>> were not ^C et al, but it's the same function. Emacs came later, 
>>> written as a set of TECO macros and commonly loaded into the "e" 
>>> QRegister - hence "E Macros".
>>>
>> I never used TECO but it was apparently a hacker's fun zone. My 
>> business partner wrote an ascii lunar lander in TECO.
>>
>> Do you know if vi had any roots in TECO?
>>
>> Mike
>>
>>
> 
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