◄ UD0 · TTY · THE TERMINAL ▸ · LOGISMÓS · 1950–1991
★ BELL LABS · 1969 · the mother editor ★
Ken Thompson's line editor (Unix, 1969) — terse, silent, command-driven; the program every later Unix tool grew from. Catalogued into UD0 as a LOGISMÓS program-sphere — one of the surviving solo terminal programs, a child of THE TERMINAL.
The Four Natures
each facet emerges by one of four natures
natural
of the filter and the one job — text in, text out, the small tool that composes
ethereal
of the world in the words — the program that talks back, the cave, the dungeon
spiritual
of thought made interactive — the language at the prompt, the loop that answers
electrical
of the system you build with — the editor, the shell, the compiler, the builder
The Program
born · what it does · the line
Born
Bell Labs · 1969
Ken Thompson wrote it for the first Unix — a line editor so spare it answers errors with a single question mark.
What it does
line editing
Address lines by number or regular expression, then change, print, or delete them — no screen, just commands and text.
The line
the root
From ed came grep (its g/re/p command), sed (its edits in a stream), and ex/vi (its visual successor).
The Facets
ed and its facets as ACI .agents — each a birth certificate & a nature (3)
Rendered, not invented — a cited history. ed is part of the documented record; authors are credited in the text and no source code or copyrighted text is reproduced. Lineage: From ed came grep (its g/re/p command), sed (its edits in a stream), and ex/vi (its visual successor). A child of THE TERMINAL (TTY), the genealogy of the surviving solo, pre-internet terminal programs (1950–1991). Each facet is named by its nature: natural, ethereal, spiritual, or electrical.