{"id":3314,"date":"2012-06-20T00:01:23","date_gmt":"2012-06-20T07:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=3314"},"modified":"2012-06-19T09:09:00","modified_gmt":"2012-06-19T16:09:00","slug":"i-remember-edlin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=3314","title":{"rendered":"I Remember EDLIN"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in the Days of DOS, EDLIN was the command prompt text editor. Or, to be precise, it was the DOS line<\/em> editor. Anyone know what a line editor is?
\n
\nAnswer: A line editor edits text one line at a time. Forget word wrap! You can type in only a line of text, editing it using simple commands. Then that line is saved; on to the next line.<\/p>\n

Want to re-edit line 3? You have to input a command to edit line 3, then you edit or retype that line. If you think typing inside a text box on the web is tough, try using a line editor.<\/p>\n

EDLIN is pronounced Ed-Lynn<\/em>, and it’s short for Line Editor. Well, it’s short and backwards. It’s loosely based on the ed<\/em> editor available since the early versions of Unix. In fact, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan wrote a lot of Unix using Ed. I don’t think any of DOS was written using EDLIN.<\/p>\n

According to the least authoritative reference on the Internet, Wikipedia, Tim Paterson wrote EDLIN to be included with his QDOS program. QDOS is what Microsoft purchased and dubbed MS-DOS. On Wikipedia, it says that Paterson expected EDLIN to die off quickly. One could only hope.<\/p>\n

I rarely, if ever, used EDLIN. There were just too many other good, full-screen, text editors available. There was one I was highly fond of called Q-Edit. I still have a copy of Q-Edit on my writing PC. It used the then-popular Wordstar cursor key diamond (and other Wordstar commands) for text editing.<\/p>\n

Anyone old enough to remember WordStar?<\/p>\n

EDLIN holds a special place in my heart because once upon a time I was drafted to write an educational book on learning how to use DOS. Knowing my history with DOS For Dummies<\/em>, you think that book would have taken off running.<\/p>\n

Nope.<\/p>\n

The academic book market is a strange thing. In many ways it’s a scam; the books are over-priced in what I believe to be collusion between college bookstores and publishers. Regardless, the group of “academics” who reviewed my DOS book blanched at the fact that I omitted EDLIN from discussion.<\/p>\n

“You have<\/em> to cover EDLIN,” they screamed.<\/p>\n

I countered that DOS at the time came with a better text editor (EDIT) and that no one — NO ONE — used EDLIN, either professionally or anywhere else. I lost that argument, and the book was never sold.<\/p>\n

Anyway, EDLIN is actually still around, some 30 years after Patterson said it would be history. Just fire up a command prompt in Windows and type EDLIN. I just tried it in Windows 8, though you need to enable 16-bit application support to get it to work. EDLIN lingers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in the Days of DOS, EDLIN was the command prompt text editor. Or, to be precise, it was the DOS line editor. Anyone know what a line editor is?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[11],"class_list":["post-3314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-dos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3314"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3314\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3319,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3314\/revisions\/3319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}