[ih] Larry Roberts & RD the first electronic mail manager software [was written in TECO on TENEX] (fwd)

[Scott O. Bradner]

you were a taco geek if you knew what your name would do if typed into teco

an aside, the secretaries at BBN used teco as their word processor - they did not
much like it (a number of them told me so)

Scott

> On Aug 9, 2023, at 6:04 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> On 10-Aug-23 06:16, Don Hopkins via Internet-history wrote:
>> How is it even possible to tell if a TECO file is scrambled or not??!
> 
> OK, now I have to tell my only TECO story. Understand that I have never
> used TECO, although I did know DEC-10 fanatics at CERN who were very
> keen on it. In about 1980 my team at CERN had a Russian visitor for
> a year (whose name I cannot recall, and he hardly spoke any English).
> He was allegedly a wizard programmer, so we asked him to create a
> syntax-driven editor for the high level language we were using
> for accelerator control. One day he announced that it was ready
> and offered a demonstration. At this point it became clear that the
> only editor he knew was TECO, and his editor was (a) full of modes
> and (b) the commands were single letters. He asked me to have
> a go. As I always did in those days to test the robustness of
> interactive code, I typed in a random string. Just before I hit
> "Enter" he grabbed my hand, shouting "No! No!". There was "EK" in
> my random string - apparently it would have destroyed everything.
> 
> We never used his code.
> 
> Sorry for the interruption.
> 
>   Brian
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