You often learn the golden rule or some variation of it as early as kindergarten. There are several ways to phrase it, but you most often hear: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” While that’s catchy, it is really an aphorism that encourages us to consider the viewpoints of others. As people who design things, this can be tricky. Sometimes, what you want isn’t necessarily what most people want, and — conversely — you might not appreciate what most people want or need.

EDIT/1000

I learned this lesson many years ago when I used to babysit a few HP/1000 minicomputers. Minicomputer sounds grand, but, honestly, a Raspberry Pi of any sort would put the old HP to shame. Like a lot of computers in those days, it had a text editor that was arcane even by the standards of vi or emacs. EDIT/1000 couldn’t be sure you weren’t using a printing terminal, and the commands reflect that.

For example, printing a few lines around the current line requires the command: “/-2,L,5” which isn’t that hard, I suppose. To delete all lines that contain a percent sign, “1$ D/%/A/” assuming you don’t want to be asked about each deletion.

Sure, sure. As a Hackaday reader, you don’t find this hard to puzzle out or remember. But back in the 1980s, a bunch of physicists and chemical engineers had little patience for stuff like that. However, the editor had a trick up its sleeve.

Old Terminal Basics

Old HP terminals didn’t work like you think of a terminal today. The computer would send a whole screen to the terminal along with some instructions. This was common on several brands of computers, even though it is rare today. For example, the computer might send a form with some data. The user can then use the terminal to modify the data or add new data. Then, with a single keystroke, the entire screen goes back to the computer for processing.

In the case of EDIT/1000, you could invoke screen mode, which would load a page of text into your terminal. Then you could use the arrow keys, insert, delete and the experience wasn’t too far from using a text editor today. Until you wanted to change pages, that is.

You’d use /S to start the screen mode from the current location in a file. But to move forward you needed to use Control+F. Well, that’s if you wanted to send your changes to the computer. You could also move forward and discard your changes by pressing Control+F twice. There were a handful of other commands you could use in screen mode. To do things like search and replace, you still needed the oddball commands along with the Control+X incantation to execute a command while in screen mode.

Complaint Department

We heard no end of complaints about EDIT/1000 and spent a lot of time helping people fix their mistakes made while editing. Training didn’t really seem to help. There didn’t seem to be any other reasonable options as far as buying a different editor.

The problem is, we were split into two camps. People who knew how to use EDIT/1000 well and people who needed to use it, but didn’t really know anything about it.

One More Puzzle Piece

HP terminals of the day all had an interesting feature. The keyboards had nine keys along the top row — what you’d think of as function keys today. The monitors always had eight little spots at the bottom that had labels for what the keys did. The ninth key let you page through a couple of sets of function keys. You can see that in the HP terminal teardown video below.

So F1 might have “Help” on the screen above it, unless you set the next page where it might say “Clear” or something. The effect was best on the terminals where the keyboard and screen were one piece so the labels lined up.

Then One Day…

I was thinking, probably uncharitably, about how stupid people were that couldn’t learn how to use the editor.  I happened to be setting up custom function keys at the time. I wrote a quick program to put a few editor-specific keys on the terminal like “next page” and “previous page” and mapped them to the correct commands.

That worked fine, and then I wrote a short program to launch the editor on a file and put it into screen mode. I grabbed someone passing by and had them try it. By the end of the day, everyone was using “my” editor.

No Genius

I can’t overstate how simple this was. I later reduced it to just a batch file that copied a text file to the terminal to set the function keys, and then launched the editor. And everyone loved it. The people who knew how to use the editor didn’t need all this, of course. And they knew how easy it was. But they loved that it saved people asking dumb questions or messing up their files. The other users just loved it because it made the editor easy.

This predates easy access to the Internet, and a common thing in those days was to trade tapes with other sites. You’d get a magnetic tape in the mail, mount it, look at what was on it, copying anything you found interesting. Then you’d add anything you had to the end, and send it to the next place. In a year or so, the tape would make its way back around to you and the process would repeat. I put my editor on the outbound tape.

Within a year or so, people were literally finding me — hard to do in those days — and sending me real letters thanking me for my editor solution.

The Moral

The script to do this was extremely trivial. It probably took 10 minutes to write and once you knew how to do it, maybe less. But the point was, the people who knew how to write the script didn’t need it. The people who needed it were those who had no more idea how to program function keys than I know how to perform open heart surgery.

It doesn’t matter if it is hardware or software. Getting into the heads of users can really pay off.