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by aab0 3544 days ago
It's interesting to read about the debate between doing editing/screen-drawing on the physical terminal ('smart' hardware) and doing it all in software. The wheel of reincarnation in action! Something we've seen in tech constantly, the balance between local vs distant computing determined by bandwidth/latency... Lately, smartphones, desktops and VR or sound: should the processing be done in the headphone/headset or away in in the PC/smartphone?
1 comments

I really liked the SUPDUP but that section describing it doesn't really get to the intense crockishness of the protocol. It really was ITS terminal control brought out over the network: the capabilities were the 36-bit terminal descriptors sent over the network in PDP-10 order.

DLW later wrote a different Emacs implementation in Lisp, Zwei, for the Lisp Machine, which was even more deeply intertwined in the system than Multics Emacs was in Multics. Zwei (Zwei was Eine Initially) followed Eine (Eine is not Emacs)

FWIW both programmers mentioned in that section, DLW (Dan Weinreb) and MRC (Mark Crispin), died relatively young.