[pjmlp]

Not ed, but definilty inspired by it, I am old enough to have done typewriting school exam on MS-DOS 3.3 edlin.

And since then never used it ever again, nor ed when a couple of years later we had Xenix access, as vi was much saner alternative.

[skissane]

I also remember using MS-DOS 3.3 EDLIN in anger, on our home computer [0] when I was roughly 8, because it was the only general purpose text editor we had. (We also had Wordstar, which I believe could save files in plain text mode, but I don’t think my dad or I knew that at the time.) I didn’t do much with it but used it to write some simple batch files. My dad had created a directory called C:\BAT and we used it a bit like a menu system, we put batch files in it to start other programs. I don’t remember any PC-compatible machines at my school, it was pretty much all Apple IIs, although the next year moved to a new school which as well as Apple IIs, also had IBM PC JXs (IBM Japan variant of the IBM PCjr which was sold to schools in Australia/New Zealand) and Acorn Archimedes.

[0] it was an IBM PC clone, an ISA bus 386SX, made by TPG - TPG are now one of Australia’s leading ISPs, but in the late 1980s were a PC clone manufacturer. It had a 40Mb hard disk, two 5.25 inch floppy drives (one 1.2Mb, the other 360Kb), and a vacant slot for a 3.5 inch floppy, we didn’t actually install the floppy in it until later. I still have it, but some of the innards were replaced, I think the motherboard currently in it is a 486 or Pentium

[tengwar2]

I have a vague memory of using EDLIN, and finding it much more usable than ED on CP/M. I didn't use ED much - as you say, Wordstar did the job, and that applied on CP/M as well.