Early DOS editors

Vassilis Prevelakis vp at cs.drexel.edu
Sat Feb 5 02:31:20 CST 2005


In cctalk Digest, Vol 18, Issue 18, 9000 VAX <vax9000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Now I use vi under DOS, The vi (and the associated grep, mv, cp, ls,
> more, ...) I found from an vintage FAT disk is very good. I don't know
> who wrote them. When you program under DOS, grep is precious.

You probably have the Mortice Kern Systems (MKS) toolkit which were (is?)
a set of Unix-like utilities for DOS. I still use the vi from that
package.

I remember back in the DOS days (1990-1 timeframe), I had access to
Unix source code (AFAIK Solaris) and I had ported troff to DOS. I
was using the MKS vi, the Turbo-C makefile and the ported troff/nroff
to write papers on a 386SX laptop during my stint in the army.
All this was running under DesqView so that I had what passed as 
a multitasking environment at the time.

Of course as soon as 386bsd came out all this crap went out of the
window, but I still have the MKS vi because it is small, fast and
works as I expect it to work (regular expressions and substitutions
in particular).

**vp




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