Ancestors

Toot

Written by David JONES on 2025-01-23 at 10:32

I woke up and realised that the Zed Reference Manual (the Cambridge Phoenix line editor that i used (not my daily driver)) should be in the Internet Archive. So now it is:

https://archive.org/details/zed-reference-manual

I still have a fondness for this editor. It's interesting from an alternate-history "what if Unix didn't win?", except that this alternate-history did happen. It streamed but you could also go backwards, a bit; which made it considerably easier to use than sed(1).

[#]Zed #Phoenix #TextEditor

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Descendants

Written by Sion [main] on 2025-01-23 at 10:50

@drj One of my favourite "WTF is that?" from that time was editing in full-screen Zed. It was like vi done right. But needed a very specific terminal set up, which is one reason E won out.

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Written by David JONES on 2025-01-23 at 10:53

@sparrowsion gotta say, i found ZEDFS absolutely horrible, but as you say, possibly that was a combination of using it on the Model B PHX ROM and/or the PWF 3270 emulator instead of a true IBM 3270. Also i was already fluent in E and becoming fluent in vi.

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Written by Sion [main] on 2025-01-23 at 11:00

@drj It was completely unusable from a PHX ROM terminal. I really benefited from it while at Birkbeck but still having a PHX account and being able to do a JANET login from the terminals there.

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Written by David JONES on 2025-01-23 at 11:02

@sparrowsion well, "completey unusable from a PHX ROM terminal" would have been nice to know at the time; perhaps they should've added a sticker to Chapter 4.

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Written by Sion [main] on 2025-01-23 at 11:13

@drj I can't remember why it didn't work in practice -- maybe it did if you knew how to drive it properly, and had the ZEDFS key sheet instead of the E one.

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Written by David JONES on 2025-01-23 at 11:18

@sparrowsion i remember being warned off it, but of course my attraction to hostile user interfaces drew me to it. Of course, every warning was correct. :)

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