TECO

[altivo]

Back in the days of the PDP-8 and other early DEC computers, the editor everyone knew was TECO (Text Editor and COrrector.) These days TECO looks pretty obtuse, just as ED (on CP/M) or EDLIN (on DOS) does to most of us. But then, TECO was as ubiquitous as vi and emacs are in the UNIX/Linux world of today. In fact, emacs is reputed to be a direct descendant of TECO.

Now the TECO editor had an "easter egg" hidden in it. The nature of that egg reveals in part the age of the editor code. As it happens, TECO is still available on all the DEC operating environments, even after they were modified and updated by Compaq and Hewlett-Packard. I thought of that today and went looking for the easter egg. It's still there, though a bit more obtuse than it used to be.

The command to tell TECO to create a new file and begin editing it was 'make filename'. This could be entered on the command line. So, to create a new file called TEST.TXT you could say

TECO MAKE TEST.TXT

The easter egg appears if you tell TECO to 'make love' as in

TECO MAKE LOVE

Unfortunately, in today's OpenVMS, TECO is no longer simply invoked by its name. I tried the

EDIT/TECO MAKE LOVE

that would seem to be required, but it gets a syntax error.

Then I thought of assigning a symbol to abbreviate the command. Sure enough, that works.
So...

TECO :== $SYS$SYSTEM:TECO32_TV.EXE

And then the command gets the traditional response...

TECO MAKE LOVE
Not war?
*_

Yep, it's that old. Same vintage as I am.

Back when I was first introduced to the VAX and VMS (in 1986 or thereabouts) we had an outside consultant who was brought in to do some work with the VAX environments. He was interesting, and I thought that in particular because he told me he had a VAX and a PDP-11 running in his basement at home. Back then, that was pretty remarkable even without thinking of the electricity it would consume. A VAX 11/750 was a good sized piece of equipment, in refrigerator sized cabinets, and ate a lot of energy. Werner (that was his name) was always smiling and cheerful, and frequently asked me to go to lunch with him or to go out for drinks. Mostly I declined, since back then work was business to me and not a social affair. I tried, for whatever reason, to keep the two separated.

Our first VAX was an 8200, one of a new line of machines that used a different CPU and microcode setup. The earlier VAXen all had a PDP emulation mode in which they could actually execute PDP-10 or PDP-11 machine code. The 8000 series no longer had that feature unless you installed an enhancement (for a price) to add it back in. Since the TECO editor was still in PDP native code, it would not run on the 8200 even though the executable module was in fact present in the OS. Werner often complained to me about the absence of TECO, his favorite editor. It took me a while to understand why it didn't work, since all the VMS manuals said that it would. (They weren't yet updated to account for the 8000 series.) Finally I had the answer for him, and explained why it wasn't available. He was the first one to tell me about the easter egg.

Now I have my own DEC computer running at home (not in the basement, though, and certainly not a VAX 11/750: a Digital Personal Work Station is only the size of a tower PC, and uses no more power than one.) And I've finally asked the question, and seen it answer just as Werner promised that it would.

Comments

[hrrunka]

Heh!

I don't quite remember what the first online editor I ever used^* was called, but it was designed to work with a teletype, and it was really quite obtuse. The version that worked on a VDU wasn't much better, but you could at least go back a line...

^{* in the computer centre at Cambridge, probably some time in late 0'78 or early '79.}

[altivo]

IBM's TSO line editor (MVS version) was first for me. It's unpleasant enough, and was designed for use over a paper teletype terminal. The line editor in early versions of Microsoft BASIC came right after that and was even worse.

I never really used TECO, though it has the "advantage" that it works on any kind of terminal. VAX/VMS and its successors have much more advanced editors, but they all require more advanced terminals as well, typically at least a very complete VT100 emulation. Without extensive key redefinitions, they can be really tough to use unless you have a real DEC keyboard too. For DEC, it's had to tell which came first: the extended keyboard or the extended editor. Both seem to have grown up together and are codependent. ;p

[hrrunka]

The Cambridge mainframe was an IBM 370/165 running MFT, but the front end was provided by a small number of PDP machines running Phoenix, which I think was an internally-written time-sharing system.

My first computer job involved an IBM 3031 running MVS with terminals served via TSO, but we had an in-house full-screen editor which beat anything IBM could offer at the time.

...and talking of co-dependence, at one point, for a short while, we had a few APL keyboards...

[altivo]

One popular fullscreen editor used on IBM systems was called Wylbur. I occasionally run across people who still swear by it. We had a third party add on to the TSO editor, possibly from SHARE or something like that, that was called FSE (full screen editor, duh) and it was pretty tolerable to use. Eventually they purchased the ISPF product from IBM which supplied the full screen editor and a lot of other features. For a time in between, we had the TSO Session Manager that allowed you to configure your terminal screen to your own tastes, including function key definitions and scrolling segments (rather like an operators console but controlled by your login session.) That one was powerful but so complicated to configure that most people never got into it.

[hrrunka]

Aye, the one we had was variously called "fse" or "fsedit" ,too. Our systems manager spent a fair bit of his time developing it. Whether it was the same beast, or from the same root as the one you used I wouldn't hazard a guess. We did evaluate ISPF, but our "fse" was quicker, smaller, and fitted our needs rather better.

[altivo]

Here's a screen shot of one version of "fse" that is pretty much the one I remember (click image to enlarge.) As I recall, the screen layout was somewhat configurable, so the line numbers could be on the right, and the ruler could be at the top if desired. The red text is a result of using a 3279 emulation. We had green monochrome 3278 terminals back in the day. ;p

Yes, I remember the APL keyboard. After I was promoted from applications to systems, they gave me a 3279 color graphics terminal on my desk, and it came with an APL keyboard. I've never learned any APL, and just contemplating all those gibberish symbols was enough to put me off the prospect. Fortunately it worked as a regular keyboard too.

[hrrunka]

It looks sort-of half familiar. I'll have to ask Dave next time I see him whether he's still got a copy of his version running anywhere. We definitely had the option to put sequence numbers there or not, and to have them displayed left or right, and the column markers were there, too, but possibly optional. Later versions also made use of the 3279 colours to some degree. I don't remember the "TOP OF DATA SET" marker at all.

...and APL was just... bizarre...

[altivo]

I'm not sure the "TOP OF DATA" thing was there in ours either, but its behavior does vary depending on the type of dataset, also. I think for JCL like this the line numbers should have appeared on the right. I'm guessing this one thinks I was looking at COBOL. This was on the Hercules emulator running MVS, a little perversion of mine...

[hrrunka]

Oh, the position of the numbers was something that could be toggled in ours. Columns 72 to 80 could appear on the left before column 1 or on the right in their correct location, and might or might not have had sequence numbers, depending. One column somwhere was sacrificed to the screen control character, too. It all seemed logical enough at the time, but looking back it was a bit bizarre... ;)