[kwlug-disc] MKS

[John Sellens]

My recollection is that FRED was a reimplementation of QED.

I was thinking JC Winterton(?) wrote it but a page on the web says it
was Peter Fraser and maybe the former did work on the TF text formatter?

FRED and QED allowed you to have mulitple buffers (think files) open,
and you could put editor commands in a buffer and then run the buffer.

Steve Hayman wrote a buffer called "flintstone" which was
installed in the system buffer location, so you could run the
"fred flintstone" command, and do things like
    fred flintstone wife
and it would tell you Wilma, and so on.

It was a simpler time then.

https://www.thinkage.ca/gcos/expl/fred/expl.html

John



On Fri, 2022/07/29 09:18:07PM -0400, Doug Moen <doug at moens.org> wrote:
| Since we are reminiscing about the good old days,
| one of the "text based realities" I experienced while working at MKS
| was using the Qed text editor (written by David Tilbrook, Rob Pike and others at U of T).
| Tilbrook was working there at the time.
| 
| This Qed had a family resemblance to the FRED text editor at University of Waterloo (FRED ran on the Honeywell in the Math department during the 1980's when I was there). In other words, it was a command line text editor, related to Unix `ed` but much more powerful, with multi-file editing and a built in programming language. It was pretty cool, and I could use some powerful tricks that aren't available to me in Vi AFAIK, but it wasn't open source and I lost access to it after I left MKS.
| 
| Doug.