Full‐screen editing in a hostile environment

This paper describes a simple full‐screen editor which operates effectively in a very restrictive hardware and software environment in which dumb CRT terminals run half‐duplex at 1200 baud to the line buffering front‐end of a timesharing mainframe. The use of such an inappropriate system is dictated by other considerations and the experiment with screen editing was motivated by the frustration encountered in manipulating highly formatted text with a line‐oriented text editor. Early success with a crude editor lead to an improved version which functions acceptably for a several types of text. The particular constraints of this environment, how they were overcome or avoided and their influence on the editor are addressed. The paper demonstrates that successful full‐screen editing in this environment calls for software that differs in its basic design from other full‐screen editors.