Doing A Sacrilege
The powers that be may drop a VAX 11/780 on me.
This is a VAX 11/780, the machine that defined the Vax MIP. During most of the prior century this computer’s “millions of instructions per second” was used to rate the performance of every other system built.
What you are seeing here, left to right, are …
The plexiglass cabinet on a table I think is a line printer.
The first two doors with the key in the middle are the CPU and memory.
The third cabinet is IO line cards.
The fourth cabinet is a 800/1600 BPI tape drive.
The short stand alone cabinet has two 474 meg Fujitsu Eagle hard drives.
The monitors on top seem to be in historic order of release - I think the first one is a Televideo 905, the a DEC VT-100, and that thing at the very end might be a DEC VT-240.
Anyway, way back at the dawn of time, I sat down in front of a terminal connected to one of these things, and I began to use MicroEMACS. This is the text editor Linus Torvalds used to create Linux, and he and I are both still using it forty years later.
This is a Fairchild A-10 Thunderbolt II, better known as the Warthog. The nickname comes from the fact that this was initially seen as an “ugly” airplane. But close air support is an ugly job. It is beloved by its pilots, and any ground troops that ever benefitted from the enormous destruction wrought by the GAU8 Avenger Gatling gun that is the frame of the machine.
MicroEMACS and the Warthog have a thing in common - they are forty year old things that are perfectly evolved for their duties. The only thing the Warthog has needed over the years was an automated gun stabilization system and a little Pave Penny targeting pod so the guys on the ground can point at what needs to receive a direct injection of freedom.
And what did MicroEMACS need? It was conceived as a code editor, and as such lines of code are however long they are. There is no auto-wrap function available.
HOWEVER …
Today I am cleaning up some Antigravity/Gemini 3 slop and I need a text editor that 1) works in the terminal window 2) with proper word wrap at the edge 3) that does not force me to learn some limited and badly flawed set of command keys, in place of stuff that just shoots outta my fingers like lightning bolts.
So I forked MicroEMACS 4.0.15 and had Claude Code make the changes.
I feel a little dirty. It’s not that I’ve never modified MicroEMACS before, but it’s been over thirty years, and I did it the correct way back then - by USING MicroEMACS to edit those C source files.
Time passes …
It’s not perfect, but it’s likely usable another forty years as is.
Mission Accomplished
