Hah. Those were some of the screen editors we complained about. Emacs was popularly said to stand for "(e)ight (m)egabytes (a)nd (c)constantly (s)wapping". (8 M

Hah. Those were some of the screen editors we complained about. Emacs was popularly said to stand for "(e)ight (m)egabytes (a)nd (c)constantly (s)wapping". (8 MB is small by today's standards, but back then it was big. I believe CITHEP's VAX 11/780 was either 4 MB or 8 MB). I don't remember what we didn't like about vi. At the time most of us were not using any screen editor. We were using the version of QED [1] that Tom Duff, Rob Pike, Hugh Redelmeier, and David Tilbrook had ported to Unix. If anyone is curious Karl's editor was named "ted", for "(t)ext (ed)itor". This was surprisingly bland because Karl was known for coming up with great names. For example when the undergraduate hackers who used Caltech's PDP-10 decided to agree on some standards for things like command switch conventions, Karl named the group working on that: the Organization to Define Definitive Hacks Against Catastrophic Kludges, AKA the odd hack committee. Mine was named "smegma", for something like "(s)ophisticated (m)odern (e)ditor with (g)lorious (m)acros (a)bilities". (I don't think I ever did actually get macros in).