* Re: editor and word processor history (was: Re: RTF for emacs) [not found] <mailman.2496.1401414782.1147.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> @ 2014-05-30 2:20 ` Emanuel Berg 2014-05-30 4:06 ` editor and word processor history Pascal J. Bourguignon 0 siblings, 1 reply; 6+ messages in thread From: Emanuel Berg @ 2014-05-30 2:20 UTC (permalink / raw) To: help-gnu-emacs Robert Thorpe <rt@robertthorpeconsulting.com> writes: > Programs were typed in using keypunches which wrote > to punched cards or using devices that wrote to paper > tape. The program was then submitted as a stack of > cards or a tape to the sysadmins who ran the > computer. The computer would then "SPOOL" copying > the paper information to magnetic tape where it could > be accessed later. Once that happened the user could > do various things like edit the code, compile it and > so on. > > This meant there was a delay between the user's > information being sent and the program execution. > Often in that time errors could be found. In that > case the user could run an editor from a teletype and > fix the errors. Doing that wouldn't necessarily > require the teletype to print out each line of code > being changed. That's why in early editors there > were commands to print out lines of code, but things > could be done without them. > > This was all high technology compared to the early > days when everything submitted on cards was compiled > and executed without question. In those early days > there were no editors. Everything depended on > punched cards and there were special machines to deal > with them which were a partial substitute. (Even in > the 1970s most small IBM computers were only sold > with peripheral for reading and punching cards.) I suppose this would be a lot easier to understand if you could actually see (and touch) the machines. I have heard that in the US (Boston and San Francisco) there are computer museum, sometimes associated with the companies themselves. Perhaps I can steal some LEGO and build small models... But as for the delay between coding and execution, that sounds really relaxing - that way, you'd never be tempted to do shortcuts or do trial-and-error until it works. Of course you can program that way today as well but sometimes time and the volume of work just make you type and hit RET until it works, and that's always less satisfactory then when you understand everything 100%. -- underground experts united: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 6+ messages in thread
* Re: editor and word processor history 2014-05-30 2:20 ` editor and word processor history (was: Re: RTF for emacs) Emanuel Berg @ 2014-05-30 4:06 ` Pascal J. Bourguignon 2014-06-01 0:07 ` Emanuel Berg 0 siblings, 1 reply; 6+ messages in thread From: Pascal J. Bourguignon @ 2014-05-30 4:06 UTC (permalink / raw) To: help-gnu-emacs Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes: > Robert Thorpe <rt@robertthorpeconsulting.com> writes: > >> Programs were typed in using keypunches which wrote >> to punched cards or using devices that wrote to paper >> tape. The program was then submitted as a stack of >> cards or a tape to the sysadmins who ran the >> computer. The computer would then "SPOOL" copying >> the paper information to magnetic tape where it could >> be accessed later. Once that happened the user could >> do various things like edit the code, compile it and >> so on. >> >> This meant there was a delay between the user's >> information being sent and the program execution. >> Often in that time errors could be found. In that >> case the user could run an editor from a teletype and >> fix the errors. Doing that wouldn't necessarily >> require the teletype to print out each line of code >> being changed. That's why in early editors there >> were commands to print out lines of code, but things >> could be done without them. >> >> This was all high technology compared to the early >> days when everything submitted on cards was compiled >> and executed without question. In those early days >> there were no editors. Everything depended on >> punched cards and there were special machines to deal >> with them which were a partial substitute. (Even in >> the 1970s most small IBM computers were only sold >> with peripheral for reading and punching cards.) > > I suppose this would be a lot easier to understand if > you could actually see (and touch) the machines. I have > heard that in the US (Boston and San Francisco) there > are computer museum, sometimes associated with the > companies themselves. You can always use simulators: http://www.masswerk.at/google60/ Otherwise, it wouldn't be too hard to configure emacs to reproduce the feel and constraints of software development in the 60s or 70s. M-x caps-mode RET M-x computer-paper RET (https://gitorious.org/com-informatimago/emacs/source/master:pjb-computer-paper.el) -- __Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/ "Le mercure monte ? C'est le moment d'acheter !" ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 6+ messages in thread
* Re: editor and word processor history 2014-05-30 4:06 ` editor and word processor history Pascal J. Bourguignon @ 2014-06-01 0:07 ` Emanuel Berg 0 siblings, 0 replies; 6+ messages in thread From: Emanuel Berg @ 2014-06-01 0:07 UTC (permalink / raw) To: help-gnu-emacs "Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com> writes: > You can always use simulators: > > http://www.masswerk.at/google60/ > > Otherwise, it wouldn't be too hard to configure emacs > to reproduce the feel and constraints of software > development in the 60s or 70s. > > M-x caps-mode RET M-x computer-paper RET > (https://gitorious.org/com-informatimago/emacs/source/master:pjb-computer-paper.el) I'll save those links and if I ever get the people I'm associated with right now to publish a magazine, I'll write an article on this topic, trying that stuff out. The attraction of the past is of course that then only (or almost so) computer people used computers. Then along came the masses which of course is a good thing (well, it's complicated). What surprises me so much though is that computer work still is so focused on technology - then, it made sense, a necessity even, but now? As an illustration, during my 5-6 years of extremely focused hacking I never felt the need for a single program that didn't already exist in I don't know how many flavours. I had to change a lot of things a lot, every day actually, but never an entire program. Still, when I talk to people, it is always, we are doing a new application, a new programming language, a new cloud-based service... I don't understand that. What's going on? And, even though there were programmers in the 60s and 70s, in absolute figures, aren't there one zillion more today? So there is something wrong with the picture which I don't get. Anyway, speaking of computers, the 60s, and chess, I was sent the following interesting review of the documentary (?) "Computer Chess": As an inveterate computer chess aficionado for many years dating back to Sargon II on my Apple II+ and carried up to the present-day domination of chess programs Houdini, Komodo and Stockfish (not joking, non-computer chess people), I can certainly appreciate many little details in this film [...] that might pass unnoticed. Captured is the weird mix of collegiality, rivalry and paranoia that has always been endemic to the hobby, represented in this film by a collection of marginal characters, deranged charlatans, academic uber-geeks and scruffy pot-smoking counterculture types in a Holiday Inn sometime in the 1979-1982 period. Especially laudatory is the film`s authenticity with respect to the tournament scenes: you see glimpses of awkward board positions that could only have been produced by primitive chess programs of that era, and the still-operational hardware of the period dug up for these scenes is simply fabulous. Likewise we can enjoy the preposterous grooming and clothing of the post-disco era, captured en passant with pitiless candor. Juxtaposed against the participants of this computer tournament are a motley collection of encounter group' New Agers occupying the hotel at the same time; they serve to put the chess geeks into perspective and produce a number of very funny interactions. Another reviewer notes that this film is Felliniesque: that is precisely correct, and an apt approach to the whole idea of computer age pioneers hauling now-archaic hardware hundreds of miles to play in a computer chess tournament in some cheap hotel. (NH aka 'Cato the Younger' in computer chess circles.) -- underground experts united: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 6+ messages in thread
* Re: RTF for emacs @ 2014-05-25 19:24 Robert Thorpe [not found] ` <mailman.2081.1401050318.1147.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> 0 siblings, 1 reply; 6+ messages in thread From: Robert Thorpe @ 2014-05-25 19:24 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Emanuel Berg; +Cc: help-gnu-emacs I appreciate everyone's replies. Emanuel Berg distinguishes between different types of documents. Firstly, there are very simple documents that just contain text, those can be written as text files. There are webpages which can be written in HTML. Large documents can be written using LaTeX. ToDo lists and organization can be written using Org mode. There's another type of document though, those that are simple, but too complex to make using plain text. I was talking about writing letters earlier. Even that case is tricky. Have you tried printing a letter containing Unicode characters? On my Xubuntu 12.04 system that doesn't work, they appear as escape codes. Unfortunately, lots of programs still don't treat UTF-8 correctly. For someone who knows LaTeX writing small documents isn't a problem. I have only done a few simple things with LaTeX. I haven't used AucTex, only Emac's LaTeX mode. In my job I write reports in Microsoft Word, I've never had a opportunity to write a long document in LaTeX. In the future, if I have the time I'd like to learn LaTeX. I understand though that it's a large and complex system, until I read this discussion I didn't know there were so many different dialects withe different capabilities. It would take me months to learn it properly. Similarly, Org mode is complex. I intend to learn that sometime in the future too, but I haven't the time at present. I spend quite a lot of time organizing things, so I expect that'll be time well spent. James Freer asked about this first, I think his situation is similar to mine. I can't justify the time I'd need to learn LaTeX since I'd use it so infrequently. That's why I'll continue using LibreOffice until something better comes along that won't take too long to learn. BR, Robert Thorpe ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 6+ messages in thread
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* Re: RTF for emacs [not found] ` <mailman.2081.1401050318.1147.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> @ 2014-05-29 0:55 ` Emanuel Berg 2014-05-29 1:38 ` editor and word processor history (was: Re: RTF for emacs) Emanuel Berg 0 siblings, 1 reply; 6+ messages in thread From: Emanuel Berg @ 2014-05-29 0:55 UTC (permalink / raw) To: help-gnu-emacs James Freer <jessejazza3.uk@gmail.com> writes: > I just wanted to know if emacs was going to produce a > word processor plugin or whatever. Come to think of it, perhaps that's not a bad idea and some people should have done something to that extent, I'm sure (because there are zillion Emacs projects) - perhaps checkout the Emacs Wiki for "RTF" or "word processor"? Perhaps those projects lost steam with the Org-mode success. Before this thread, I thought Org-mode was sort of the Emacs equivalent of a word processor but turns out it is some sort of markup system which sounds like another markup language to learn - might as well use HTML or LaTeX directly in that case, it would seem... The reason I don't like word processors in general are they typically rely on the mouse, or/and the cursor keys, and/or the "Page Up"/"Page Down" keys, to do cursor movement and scrolling, which I find moronic compared to the Emacs way. Also, they use the CUA keys (Ctrl-C to copy etc.) which I consider inferior to the kill ring (killing and yanking), but not by far by as wide a margin. Also, word processors are not programmable like Emacs and the result produced is proprietary or at best less portable. People tend to fiddle with fonts and margins and God knows what for hours just to have another computer or printer view/print it with other fonts and specifications anyway... > I'm not an IT grad and I don't find emacs easy to > learn. Being an IT grad typically doesn't apply to that as much as those educations are theoretical for the most part, however the same people that are on those educations often have an interest for tools and the practical side to it (or "obsession" perhaps is more to it), so you are both right and wrong. But if you are a practical man with an interest in how you do things, and for computers, Emacs shouldn't be difficult to learn, or acquire a working understanding of, at least. How it works under the hood, the C and Lisp, programmers in general don't understand, only those who have taken special time and interest (lots of both). > I use it for editing prose text as features I love > namely; mid cursor positioning (very useful when > typing pages and pages... irritating in other editors > to constantly type at the bottom of the screen) Interesting. I never thought (or used) that, what is it? I can't say I have a problem typing anywhere but I use a projector so when I have my head straight my eyes are actually at the bottom 4th or 5th of the "screen". > wordstar keybindings (still the most efficient and > still popular with writers) I never heard of WordStar - it doesn't seem to be related to Oracle's StarOffice either because it originated from a program called StarWriter. The Emacs' keybindings for point movement, the C-f, C-b, M-f, M-b, etc. and the whole char/word/line/etc. division is obviously fantastic, one of the things with Emacs that I always mention as it makes typing a whole other experience. > visual line mode (softwrap or whatever you want to > call the equivalent) which few editors do > effectively... I used visual-line-mode in my early Emacs days but then I got more into the "it should look exactly as it is" so I switched to auto-fill-mode. > my other favourite editor is gedit gedit? Isn't that the basic editor you get with GNOME that's hardly more than notepad? > My gripe with emacs is that it takes a lot of > learning. Natural app for the IT graduate. I'd love > to have a LUG group where I could sit down for an > hour with someone and go through a few things to > reduce the learning curve. I think you overestimate the IT graduates. Most IT graduates have horrible taste just like anyone else and they are not passionate about their editors. They just use what's in front of them - Eclipse, for example... Anyway, lacking a LUG you can use this list. It is what it is for. A lot of the loud discussion may concern coding and other advanced topics but it is just what people enjoy to discuss. Very basic questions are just as fine and people enjoy answering them as well. Good luck! -- underground experts united: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 6+ messages in thread
* editor and word processor history (was: Re: RTF for emacs) 2014-05-29 0:55 ` Emanuel Berg @ 2014-05-29 1:38 ` Emanuel Berg 2014-05-29 7:23 ` editor and word processor history Glyn Millington ` (2 more replies) 0 siblings, 3 replies; 6+ messages in thread From: Emanuel Berg @ 2014-05-29 1:38 UTC (permalink / raw) To: help-gnu-emacs Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes: > I never heard of WordStar - it doesn't seem to be > related to Oracle's StarOffice either because it > originated from a program called StarWriter. Wait... It's coming back to me. Like a blue, gray, and white star as the splash screen, for the early PC? Back then, I used computers from the accursed Apple world, so the word processors were MacWrite, M$ Word, and, much later, ClarisWorks (shivers). On the PC at somewhat the same time, perhaps a bit later, there were the WordPerfect, which was simpler, along with Word. For the Unix world, I have read there was once an editor called ed that didn't showed the file being manipulated at all - the "state" of the file, as it was called (unbelievable). Some people actually liked that, so some other people made em ("ed for mortals") which I believe showed a single line - that project (em) forked to ex (extended editor) and ded (display editor). ex later became vi (visual editor) and even later vim ("vi improved"). Emacs (or EMACS, the macro editor) came from the MIT project TECO (text/tape editor and corrector). nano is another very basic editor yet to be mentioned. sed (stream editor) is not really an editor - a batch editor perhaps, but then there are many Unix tools that maps input to output, where both currencies are text streams. -- underground experts united: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 6+ messages in thread
* Re: editor and word processor history 2014-05-29 1:38 ` editor and word processor history (was: Re: RTF for emacs) Emanuel Berg @ 2014-05-29 7:23 ` Glyn Millington [not found] ` <mailman.2380.1401356412.1147.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> [not found] ` <mailman.2376.1401348837.1147.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> 2 siblings, 0 replies; 6+ messages in thread From: Glyn Millington @ 2014-05-29 7:23 UTC (permalink / raw) To: help-gnu-emacs Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes: > For the Unix world, I have read there was once an > editor called ed that didn't showed the file being > manipulated at all If you are running a unix-style system, chances are that ed is still there. Try 'man ed'. Ex and vi are likely to be there too. Have you seen this? http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html atb Glyn ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 6+ messages in thread
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* Re: editor and word processor history [not found] ` <mailman.2380.1401356412.1147.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> @ 2014-05-29 12:32 ` Haines Brown 0 siblings, 0 replies; 6+ messages in thread From: Haines Brown @ 2014-05-29 12:32 UTC (permalink / raw) To: help-gnu-emacs I was once such a Describe enthusiast that I have to drop its name. If I recall correctly, I ran it under OS/2. It was a modified desktop publishing application. The author abandoned it, unfortunately, without releasing it into the public domian. Haines Brown ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 6+ messages in thread
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* Re: editor and word processor history [not found] ` <mailman.2376.1401348837.1147.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> @ 2014-05-29 23:51 ` Emanuel Berg 0 siblings, 0 replies; 6+ messages in thread From: Emanuel Berg @ 2014-05-29 23:51 UTC (permalink / raw) To: help-gnu-emacs Glyn Millington <glyn.millington@gmail.com> writes: > If you are running a unix-style system Ha-ha, don't insult me :) > chances are that ed is still there. Try 'man ed'. Ex > and vi are likely to be there too. On 64-bit Debian Wheezy, ed is not installed by default but it is available (for example) in the Jessie repositories. I can't find ex or plain vi, though there are many forks of vi (vile - "vi like Emacs", nvi - a 4.4BSD vi, etc.) aside from vim, which is there (also in many flavours), of course. Interestingly, I have a "vi" (by way of several links actually /usr/bin/vim.tiny) and I don't remember installing that. I remember installing Emacs, which isn't installed by default which of course it should be. (On the other hand, installing with aptitude (or apt-get) is so easy I don't see what it matters really.) -- underground experts united: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 6+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2014-06-01 0:07 UTC | newest] Thread overview: 6+ messages (download: mbox.gz follow: Atom feed -- links below jump to the message on this page -- [not found] <mailman.2496.1401414782.1147.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> 2014-05-30 2:20 ` editor and word processor history (was: Re: RTF for emacs) Emanuel Berg 2014-05-30 4:06 ` editor and word processor history Pascal J. Bourguignon 2014-06-01 0:07 ` Emanuel Berg 2014-05-25 19:24 RTF for emacs Robert Thorpe [not found] ` <mailman.2081.1401050318.1147.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> 2014-05-29 0:55 ` Emanuel Berg 2014-05-29 1:38 ` editor and word processor history (was: Re: RTF for emacs) Emanuel Berg 2014-05-29 7:23 ` editor and word processor history Glyn Millington [not found] ` <mailman.2380.1401356412.1147.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> 2014-05-29 12:32 ` Haines Brown [not found] ` <mailman.2376.1401348837.1147.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> 2014-05-29 23:51 ` Emanuel Berg
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