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there can only be one true editor



Careful, the ed fans are not to be trifled with


About 10 years ago, I was working with a much younger team (I'm 61 now), and we had a Sun box that was broken in a co-lo.

The guy sent down there had a laptop and a serial cable.

I talked him through how to use one of the serial comms programs (miniterm?) to connect, but of course, there was no ncurses or equivalent, so not even vi would work to edit a file.

So I got him to use "ed". It was hilarious that he thought I was, in some way, a magician. He and the others I was working with (all at least 2 decades younger than me) didn't understand why you'd want a "line editor" or how you could possibly write code using a DECwriter or, even worse, an ASR-33.

It was then that I started feeling "old" in this industry.




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