TECO and 'make love' (was Re: How do you tell a wizard?)

[Randal Schwartz]

In article <1989Nov13.113806.15467 at gdt.bath.ac.uk>, exspes at gdr (P E Smee) writes:
| In article <15770 at bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> jik at athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens) writes:
| >% make love
| >Make:  Don't know how to make love.  Stop.
| 
| Ah.  Under OS/8 (on the PDP-8's, remember them?) 'make' was the command
| used to invoke the editor (teco) when making a new file.  The programmer
| had decided it would be humourous to catch that, so when you typed:
| 
|   make love
| 
| it said
| 
|   not war
| 
| and exited.  Since the 8 was basically a 4K (12-bit word) machine, I used
| to resent the lost space.

Lost space?  If it was anything like the 11 implementation,
command-line interpretation of a TECO command line was done by loading
in the command-line interpreter (in TECO, no less!) as the initial
user input.  After the first command, >poof< it all went away.
Because of this, you could get a copy of the command line interpreter
by typing '*a' as your first two characters on your first prompt, and
the 'a' Q-register would contain the command-line interpreter, ready
for hacking!  (One of the things that the stock C-L-I did was check
for something like TECINI.TEC, and replace itself with that if found,
so you could copy the stock C-L-I using the above method into that
file, and hack away.)

OB Wizard Reference: That's how *I* found out about the "make love" in
TECO.  Nobody told me... I saw it in the source.

(I'm wasting very valuable neurons remembering this... you should be
thankful... :-)

Just another old-time TECO hacker,
-- 
/== Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095 ====\
| on contract to Intel's iWarp project, Hillsboro, Oregon, USA, Sol III  |
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