From: patl@athena.mit.edu (Patrick J. LoPresti) Subject: The True Path (long) Date: 11 Jul 91 03:17:31 GMT Newsgroups: alt.religion.emacs,alt.slack
When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi *and* Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like, 'C-h for help' and '"foo" File is read only'. So I use the editor that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.
Ed, man! !man ed
ED(1) UNIX Programmer's Manual ED(1)
NAME ed - text editor
SYNOPSIS ed [ - ] [ -x ] [ name ] DESCRIPTION Ed is the standard text editor. ---
Computer Scientists love ed, not just because it comes first alphabetically, but because it's the standard. Everyone else loves ed because it's ED!
"Ed is the standard text editor."
And ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair. Just look:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 24 Oct 29 1929 /bin/ed -rwxr-xr-t 4 root 1310720 Jan 1 1970 /usr/ucb/vi -rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990 /usr/bin/emacs
Of course, on the system *I* administrate, vi is symlinked to ed. Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!
"Ed is the standard text editor."
Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:
--- Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.
"Ed is the standard text editor."
Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.
ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA! ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!
When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!
TEXT EDITOR.
When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their "edlin" on a UNIX standard, did they mimic vi? No. Emacs? Surely you jest. They chose the most karmic editor of all. The standard.
Ed is for those who can *remember* what they are working on. If you are an idiot, you should use Emacs. If you are an Emacs, you should not be vi. If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION. THE SO-CALLED "VISUAL" EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE FAITHLESS. DO NOT GIVE IN!!! THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!!
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Name:
Anonymous2017-03-02 15:09
You kids wouldn't know what day of the week it was! Back in my day, we used to have to send a self-addressed envelope to a remote server, then wait a couple weeks for a response. Gee I tell you the TCP start up delays were a bitch. And it wasn't any of this new-fangled web shit either.
State of the fucking art back in those steam-powered intertubes days was gopher, telnet and ftp. If we could find it on a local archie server, run by some bolshie academic pinhead, it'd still take a week to download. Then you'd probably have to compile it and find it was written for some expensive fucking academic hardware and you'd have to start again.
Now if you wanted to talk to someone on the other side of the world, you'd use something like irc or a mud. Remember muds? You'd type something and about 30 seconds later your character would be echoed back. You see back then, Australia's connection to the intertubes was poor old Robert Elz out in the courtyard at Melbourne University with a giant fire, kept constantly stoked by unfortunate PhD students. Those poor kids would have to keep that fire burning hot and smoky, kre Elz could create packets out of smoke signals. Some poor grad student over in Hawaii would try and interpret the smoke signals and send them on to the real intertubes. As you can imagine, errors and retransmission were pretty common. The latency was fucking insane. You'd find the conversation in the irc channel had moved on by the time you saw your own message echoed back.
So don't start fucken moaning about "only" getting six fucking megabits per fucking second. Luxury I tell yer!
