Emacs for over aged hippies?!

Emacs for over aged hippies?!

[Emanuel Berg]

I was in a discussion on rec.bicycles.tech on
the properties of the combination spanner
(combination wrench) but as it happened the
discussion drifted away across the Pacific to
Easter Island, Russian history, and

    Word Star, perhaps the most successful of
    the early word processes. It was
    a monolithic program in assembly language
    and ran on the Z-80 processor, on the CP/M
    operating system. It was written by a guy
    named " John Robbins Barnaby", in four
    months. 137,000 lines of assembler code.

To this I wrote:

    There is an Emacs mode (built in,
    actually): wordstar-mode Command: Major
    mode with WordStar-like key bindings.

    Is that the same? Sounds like it.
    
    For the real deal tho one would get a Z-80
    CP/M emulator to run... or a time machine.

And then I got:

    Emacs? Good Lord! I thought you had to be
    an over aged hippie to use that :-)

???

-- 
underground experts united .... http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
Emacs Gnus Blogomatic ......... http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/blogomatic
                   - so far: 66 Blogomatic articles -                   

Re: Emacs for over aged hippies?!

[Martin Neubauer]

On 15/08/2016 13:15, Emanuel Berg wrote:
> I was in a discussion on rec.bicycles.tech on
> the properties of the combination spanner
> (combination wrench) but as it happened the
> discussion drifted away across the Pacific to
> Easter Island, Russian history, and
>
>     Word Star, perhaps the most successful of
>     the early word processes. It was
>     a monolithic program in assembly language
>     and ran on the Z-80 processor, on the CP/M
>     operating system. It was written by a guy
>     named " John Robbins Barnaby", in four
>     months. 137,000 lines of assembler code.
>
> To this I wrote:
>
>     There is an Emacs mode (built in,
>     actually): wordstar-mode Command: Major
>     mode with WordStar-like key bindings.
>
>     Is that the same? Sounds like it.
>
>     For the real deal tho one would get a Z-80
>     CP/M emulator to run... or a time machine.
>
> And then I got:
>
>     Emacs? Good Lord! I thought you had to be
>     an over aged hippie to use that :-)
>
> ???
>
At least the man page is pretty concise: http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/emacs


-- 
Angenommen, ein Ring ist ein umfaßtes Loch, und ein Rohr ist ein 
ummanteltes Loch. Was wäre dann, wenn man das Rohr zu einem Torus 
zusammenbiegt, das gesamte Gebilde?

Re: Emacs for over aged hippies?!

[Emanuel Berg]

Martin Neubauer wrote:

> At least the man page is pretty concise:
> http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/emacs

I didn't get this joke. Or do hippies like
concise stuff? It looks like some random Vi
anti-Emacs half-lame prank to me.

-- 
underground experts united .... http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
Emacs Gnus Blogomatic ......... http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/blogomatic
                   - so far: 66 Blogomatic articles -                   

Re: Emacs for over aged hippies?!

[Bob Proulx]

Emanuel Berg wrote:
> I was in a discussion on rec.bicycles.tech on
> the properties of the combination spanner
> (combination wrench) but as it happened the
> discussion drifted away across the Pacific to
> Easter Island, Russian history, and
> 
>     Word Star, perhaps the most successful of
>     the early word processes. It was
>     a monolithic program in assembly language
>     and ran on the Z-80 processor, on the CP/M
>     operating system. It was written by a guy
>     named " John Robbins Barnaby", in four
>     months. 137,000 lines of assembler code.

I used Wordstar "'back-in-the-day" myself.  It was a good editor for
the time.

> To this I wrote:
> 
>     There is an Emacs mode (built in,
>     actually): wordstar-mode Command: Major
>     mode with WordStar-like key bindings.
> 
>     Is that the same? Sounds like it.

Emacs has a wordstar-mode mode available.  But that is not real
Wordstar which was written in x86 assembly language.  Emacs ws-mode
was written by Juergen Nickelsen.  The NEWS file says it has been
removed with this note:

  *** tpu-edt.el, ws-mode.el
  These emulations of old editors are believed to be no longer relevant
   - contact emacs-devel@gnu.org if you disagree.

At one time Wordstar was one of the very popular editors.  Therefore
having an emacs mode that used the same keybindings was also a
somewhat popular way to allow people to use emacs but immediately be
productive using keybindings that they already knew.

But it is now twenty years later and I think very few people use
Wordstar.  George R. R. Martin not withstanding.  (He is the very
prolific Game of Thrones author and is well known as someone who
writes everything he writes in Wordstar.)  Therefore emacs wordstar
mode is going to have a smaller user base too.

>     For the real deal tho one would get a Z-80
>     CP/M emulator to run... or a time machine.

Or an x86 running DOS.  I am sure it would run fine under FreeDOS.

> And then I got:
> 
>     Emacs? Good Lord! I thought you had to be
>     an over aged hippie to use that :-)
> 
> ???

They are joking with you.  They included a smiley to explicitly say
they were joking.  Don't make too much of it.  Just smile and either
say nothing or joke back.

The implication is that people who learned emacs are all of the same
generation.  Hippies were usually stereotyped as being 20-something
and "different".  An older generation from the time of the hippie era.
But add 20 years and now we would be an old hippie.

Most people think of "My Generation" by The Who.  But in this
conversation maybe The Zimmers version applies better.

  The Zimmers "My Generation"
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqfFrCUrEbY

Bob

P.S. If you don't know the song here is original by The Who.

  The Who - My Generation
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=594WLzzb3JI

Re: Emacs for over aged hippies?!

[sms]

On 8/15/2016 4:15 AM, Emanuel Berg wrote:
> I was in a discussion on rec.bicycles.tech on
> the properties of the combination spanner
> (combination wrench) but as it happened the
> discussion drifted away across the Pacific to
> Easter Island, Russian history, and
>
>     Word Star, perhaps the most successful of
>     the early word processes. It was
>     a monolithic program in assembly language
>     and ran on the Z-80 processor, on the CP/M
>     operating system. It was written by a guy
>     named " John Robbins Barnaby", in four
>     months. 137,000 lines of assembler code.

I was a Wordstar (DOS) guru.

You can still run it using VDOS. Not sure about printing anything unless 
you could install a parallel port card that supports the legacy DOS 
addresses

Install VDOS <https://www.vdos.info/files/20160601/vDosSetup.exe>
Install Wordstar 
<https://winworldpc.com/download/46C67977-18DA-11E4-99E5-7054D21A8599>

Re: Emacs for over aged hippies?!

[sms]

On 8/15/2016 4:15 AM, Emanuel Berg wrote:
> I was in a discussion on rec.bicycles.tech on
> the properties of the combination spanner
> (combination wrench) but as it happened the
> discussion drifted away across the Pacific to
> Easter Island, Russian history, and
>
>     Word Star, perhaps the most successful of
>     the early word processes. It was
>     a monolithic program in assembly language
>     and ran on the Z-80 processor, on the CP/M
>     operating system. It was written by a guy
>     named " John Robbins Barnaby", in four
>     months. 137,000 lines of assembler code.

Not sure if I posted this before, but you can still run Wordstar under 
V-DOS.

Install VDOS <https://www.vdos.info/files/20160601/vDosSetup.exe>

Install Wordstar 
<https://winworldpc.com/download/46C67977-18DA-11E4-99E5-7054D21A8599>

Not sure how you'd print unless you had a legacy parallel port card in 
your system that you could set to the legacy PPT address, as well as a 
supported printer.

Re: Emacs for over aged hippies?!

[Emanuel Berg]

sms wrote:

> Not sure if I posted this before, but you can
> still run Wordstar under V-DOS.
>
> Install VDOS
> <https://www.vdos.info/files/20160601/vDosSetup.exe>
>
> Install Wordstar
> <https://winworldpc.com/download/46C67977-18DA-11E4-99E5-7054D21A8599>
>
> Not sure how you'd print ...

Ne neither :)

For starters anyone can try the major mode for
Emacs or the Joe editor available from the
Debian repos :)

-- 
underground experts united .... http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
Emacs Gnus Blogomatic ......... http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/blogomatic
                   - so far: 66 Blogomatic articles -                   

Re: Emacs for over aged hippies?!

[Mike Causer]

On Mon, 15 Aug 2016 13:15:31 +0200
Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> quoted:

>     Emacs? Good Lord! I thought you had to be
>     an over aged hippie to use that :-)

Pretend hippies are still using vi (OK, Vim nowadays).

Four of my bikes are older even than emacs & vi and another one was
bought new in the period between learning emacs and switching to vi
after starting with Unix.


Hint to self:  after leaving "external editor" and back to
mail-agent's native editor -- vi commands no longer work.  OK? 
:wq


Mike

Re: Emacs for over aged hippies?!

[Emanuel Berg]

Mike Causer wrote:

> Four of my bikes are older even than emacs &
> vi and another one was bought new in the
> period between learning emacs and switching
> to vi after starting with Unix.

From when do you date Emacs and Vi?

1976 is arguably a good year for both and if so
I also have many bikes older than that :)

-- 
underground experts united .... http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
Emacs Gnus Blogomatic ......... http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/blogomatic
                   - so far: 66 Blogomatic articles -                   

Re: Emacs for over aged hippies?!

[Gian Uberto Lauri]

> On 15 Aug 2016, at 21:00, Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> wrote:
> 
> Mike Causer wrote:
> 
>> Four of my bikes are older even than emacs &
>> vi and another one was bought new in the
>> period between learning emacs and switching
>> to vi after starting with Unix.
> 
> From when do you date Emacs and Vi?
> 
> 1976 is arguably a good year for both and if so
> I also have many bikes older than that :)

The seventies gave us the best music and the best editors. Maybe even the best OS

--
One that was a young boy then...

Re: Emacs for over aged hippies?!

[Filipe Silva]

Funny that there's a renewed interest for keybind intensive editors like
emacs and vim. I'm seeing quite a few of my coworkers and friends who
program trying to learn vim or emacs. And I was born in 1982. 3 months of
vim or emacs and your old editor is already eclipsed.

I think that's because of the devops/docker surge. It forces you to work
with unix, many times without a gui. And you have to be efficient editing
text in this guiless environment. And then you discover that you are orders
of magnitude more efficient editing text without a mouse. And then you're
hooked.



On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 4:09 PM, Gian Uberto Lauri <saint@eng.it> wrote:

>
> > On 15 Aug 2016, at 21:00, Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> wrote:
> >
> > Mike Causer wrote:
> >
> >> Four of my bikes are older even than emacs &
> >> vi and another one was bought new in the
> >> period between learning emacs and switching
> >> to vi after starting with Unix.
> >
> > From when do you date Emacs and Vi?
> >
> > 1976 is arguably a good year for both and if so
> > I also have many bikes older than that :)
>
> The seventies gave us the best music and the best editors. Maybe even the
> best OS
>
> --
> One that was a young boy then...
>
>

Re: Emacs for over aged hippies?!

[Emanuel Berg]

Filipe Silva <filipe.silva@gmail.com> writes:

> Funny that there's a renewed interest for keybind
> intensive editors like emacs and vim. I'm seeing quite
> a few of my coworkers and friends who program trying
> to learn vim or emacs. And I was born in 1982.

Professional programmers of today's age are a joke.
We are the real professionals. That's why I have
a bike repair shop and work in the forest. That means
the real mechanics and wood choppers are probably
doing it all evenings and nights with no pay or
encouragement whatsoever, thinking my God, the
mechanics and wood choppers of today's age are a joke!

Seriously, I have a big, cold, dark and quiet room
with a Raspberry Pi, the Pi version of Debian, and
a projector that displays the glory on a white bed
sheet. It is all some 4000 SEK, 3000 of which is the
projector and the rest the Pi.

Now, today I was in an office building and I looked
into a room which housed a development studio doing
a chess application for the "smart"phone plague.
The room was not bigger than 15 squares and it housed
no less then five puny guys all dressed in black,
backs bent staring into their laptops which really
upheld that designation, if you know what I'm saying.

I didn't dare to look close enough to see their
software tho. Maybe they DID use Emacs or vim?
No - impossible! They were on Eclipse or perhaps some
web-based JavaScript browser... they had to be!

> I think that's because of the devops/docker surge.
> It forces you to work with unix, many times without
> a gui.

Everyone wants to use Unix without a GUI. The last
part, only the coolest manage.

Mind you, even tho the original AT&T UNIX was once
contained, it didn't stop it from spreading first to
the commercial world, then the university world, and
then to the rest of the world with the Linuxes of the
90s and onwards ever since. With the R-Pis, it might
even spread to the subatomic world, eventually...

> And you have to be efficient editing text in this
> guiless environment. And then you discover that you
> are orders of magnitude more efficient editing text
> without a mouse. And then you're hooked.

In fact, you become so efficient, all you do is do
even more advanced stuff, which makes you want to do
and enables you to do even more advanced stuff, so
before long you do it 24/7 with no time to eat or
sleep and the amazing thing is just how efficient it
is :)

-- 
underground experts united .... http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
Emacs Gnus Blogomatic ......... http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/blogomatic
                   - so far: 26 Blogomatic articles -                   

Re: Emacs for over aged hippies?!

[Tosspot]

On 15/08/16 13:15, Emanuel Berg wrote:
> I was in a discussion on rec.bicycles.tech on
> the properties of the combination spanner
> (combination wrench) but as it happened the
> discussion drifted away across the Pacific to
> Easter Island, Russian history, and
>
>     Word Star, perhaps the most successful of
>     the early word processes. It was
>     a monolithic program in assembly language
>     and ran on the Z-80 processor, on the CP/M
>     operating system. It was written by a guy
>     named " John Robbins Barnaby", in four
>     months. 137,000 lines of assembler code.
>
> To this I wrote:
>
>     There is an Emacs mode (built in,
>     actually): wordstar-mode Command: Major
>     mode with WordStar-like key bindings.
>
>     Is that the same? Sounds like it.
>
>     For the real deal tho one would get a Z-80
>     CP/M emulator to run... or a time machine.
>
> And then I got:
>
>     Emacs? Good Lord! I thought you had to be
>     an over aged hippie to use that :-)
>
> ???

Welcome to 1975 :-)

Re: Emacs for over aged hippies?!

[Emanuel Berg]

Tosspot wrote:

> Welcome to 1975 :-)

You see? 1976 didn't stick that long :)

-- 
underground experts united .... http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
Emacs Gnus Blogomatic ......... http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/blogomatic
                   - so far: 66 Blogomatic articles -                   

Re: Emacs for over aged hippies?!

[Gene]

> And then I got:
> 
>     Emacs? Good Lord! I thought you had to be
>     an over aged hippie to use that :-)
> 
> ???

I believe the replies thus far have played off `figure' rather than `ground' vis-a-vis both figure-ground perception and figure-ground relations.

If one boarded Sherman and Peabody's wayback machine to the mid 70s one would discover wordstar as a TEXT EDITOR among text editors, as the `word processor' and the IBM PC had not yet appeared as a backdrop for mere `text' editors.

ref: https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=Sherman%20and%20Peabody%27s%20wayback%20machine

Once WYSIWYG word processors emerged as wizbang NEWER tech, EVERY mere `text' editor was contrastively seen by the users of the latest `state of the art' SUPERFICIAL programs-cum-apps as outmoded, non-sexy road kill as glimpsed in passing through their rear view mirrors.

Now both text and `words' are something optional that most users of phones smarter than they are apply to pictures and videos they upload to Facebook, Youtube, and Pintest.

That emacs doesn't pander primarily to those for whom pictures and videos are the media which IS the message means that those users of touch screens as found on smart phones and tablets regard it quaint, outmoded, or something an `over aged hippie' would use ... perhaps to add hashtags to their vapid, vacuous `home movies'

The comment doesn't leverage off `Wordstar' so much as The Paradigm in which both Wordstar and Emacs were/are part and parcel: TUI-accessible text-based `information'; the GUI-ized touch screen has made touch typing problematic, if not impossible, and if you can't fap to an image appearing on your screen then it's NOT -- perhaps post-modern -- `information' as those NOT qualifying as `over aged hippies' would behold it.

Now if an emacs mode were to appear which allowed an assortment of hashtags to be provided to search for pics and videos hosted by FB, youtube, pinterest, and such AND emacs became `an app' available for both android and all the Apple gadgets those people with phones smarter than they are WOULD undoubtedly regard it hip and trendy.

Marshall McLuhan was right; "The Medium is the Message" 
Both Wordstar and emacs employ a textual medium associated with a bygone paradigm upstaged by a paradigm in which PICTURES APPEAR which one can TOUCH.

As someone who may resemble the remark `over aged hippie' I'll fade out with
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta7nYaeEO7g

Cheers!
  Gene