Talk:Expensive Typewriter

Steve Piner's Recollections

I wrote Expensive Typewriter in 1961 initially as a program editor - at that time, the PDP-1 used paper tapes, prepared off-line on a Friden Flexowriter. It was very difficult to edit these tapes on the Flexowriter. You had to read the tape on the Friden, watching closely until you got to the part you wanted to edit. Then you would shut off the reader, enter the next text on the keyboard (or to delete, shut off the punch, then turn the reader back on until you were past the incorrect portion). For long tapes, it was quite tedious. The original version of ET, which ran using the Soroban as a control, was a line-number oriented editor; you could copy N lines, skip N lines, insert new lines, etc. It didn't take long for me to add primitive search capabilities, so then you could address relative to tags (labels) in place of line numbers. This then led to more general use as a letter writer, and I added justification capabilities to it. L. Peter Deutch later contributed to the development, adding many improvements. The inspiration for ET was Collossal Typewriter, which was a very primitive editor. The PDP-1 (to my knowledge), and certainly ET, never "drove" a Friden Flexowriter.

Steve Piner

Thanks for posting that!

Atlant 20:17, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)