Quote:
Originally Posted by j.p.s
Four secretaries in the patent department at Bell Labs used it in the '70s.
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Which meant that they were using ed. Gawd, those poor secretaries. There probably aren't many here who've used ed and so can't relate. I have no idea what alternatives they could have used; maybe teco on a DECsystem 10; it was sort of the precursor to emacs. Or maybe they could have used something on an IBM mainframe.
If you've read that Bell Systems Technical Journal that's devoted to Unix (an issue that was done in the 1970s or thereabouts) you can see that Unix wasn't designed for regular end users, it was more of a research project. Bell Labs at that time was sort of like Google today, everyone had a PhD and was very smart. Unix was simply amazing compared to the clunky operating systems from those days.
The clever thing that Bell Labs did was to make Unix free for universities, whereas everyone else had to pay a fortune. So it was used in all of the computer science departments and so Bell Labs "infected" all of those CS majors with the Unix bug.