OT: on the responsiveness of old computers vs new ones

[BigEd]

Ah, PED is for DOS:
http://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?PED
I'd wondered if it was another VMS one like TPU
http://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?TPU
but I had no recollection of the name. All is now clear.

[rwiker]

BigEd wrote:

Ah, PED is for DOS:
http://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?PED
I'd wondered if it was another VMS one like TPU
http://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?TPU
but I had no recollection of the name. All is now clear.

This is not the PED I'm looking for

... I think.

PED was a programming editor running under Sintran-III on Norsk Data superminis in the 80s. I think there was also a version running on PCs, but I'm not absolutely sure about that.

[BigEd]

Oh, that sounds much more interesting!

[whartung]

I've never heard of PED. On VMS we used EDT (which I think was the precursor to TPU). EDT was notable in that the bulk of the commands were on the VT 100 keypad, much like the original PC keyboard, and not in "num lock" mode. It relied heavily on the "GOLD" Key, which was the upper left hand corner key.

The biggest thing we routinely did was either program a macro and then spam the . key. I really don't recall much of it.

Wow, the GOLD key even has its own Wiki page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_key_(DEC)

From a Wiki page on EDT:

Quote:

DEC later developed TPU, a powerful language for designing text editors on its VMS systems. TPU was used to produce a new standard text editor, EVE, as well as to rewrite EDT. EVE included an emulator of the EDT screen mode keypad for the benefit of those who were used to particular key functions. Both EVE and the TPU implementation of EDT are still distributed with OpenVMS.

Yea, that makes sense. I didn't recall EDT being some general purpose, infinitely extensible thing. So, looks like they wrote TPU and then cloned EDT, but that was after my time.

Edit:
I will say, at the time, the GOLD key worked. It never seemed bothersome to use. Editing function was basically like doing 10 key numeric entry. There's basically 30 commands to memory, and they're all blind with no mnemonics, you just learned what 3 and GOLD 3 did. So, it was all muscle memory.

In contrast to Emacs, where you can use the ESC key for META (instead of M-X, you can do ESC-X). But since you're all over the keyboard, for me, it doesn't stick as well. The compact nature of the keypad just worked really well, and not a lot of "CTRL" pinky problems, etc.

[GARTHWILSON]

25+ years ago I was using the Norton Editor in DOS.  It took 35KB of program space IIRC.  It worked fine and never kept me waiting, even on the original 4.77MHz PC we ran it on in the 1980's.  It had a reasonably good set of features but was limited to 80 columns, and you could only have two files open at once, with the screen split in the middle with one file showing in the top half and another inn the bottom half.

In about 1993, I switched to MultiEdit [1] for DOS which took about 237K of program space.  The improvement was extreme; but although I originally ran it on a 16MHz '286, and it never kept me waiting either, until I ran it under DOSBox (DOS emulator) on my 3.2GHz 64-bit dual-core PC here with 6GB of RAM. [2]  Yes, the 16MHz '286 ran it faster than the semi-modern PC running the DOS emulator.  On the latter, a string search may take several seconds in a text file of 5,000-10,000 lines.  I don't remember it ever getting behind when I type though.  I wonder what parallels there might be between the DOS emulation and interpreted Java done on modern PCs.

[1] Edit, 8/9/25:  I just found out, from the Wikipedia article that MultiEdit is defunct, due to the heart-attack death of the man who really made it go, and that even the website has been gone since Aug 2022.

[2]Edit, 8/9/25:  I've switched to DOSbox-X which is a huge improvement over DOSbox, and can turn the emulation speed way up so it's not so slow.

[Tor]

The PED I was thinking about was, indeed, the Norsk Data PED, a different beast from the DOS variant linked to (although I think there was, at some point, an actual DOS version of the ND tool. But I've never seen one. It was during the rise of PCs when they tried to connect the two worlds of minis and micros).

The only place I can still run PED is on my ND-100 mini, and on my emulator - I can actually edit Unix files with it. Although it will add CR/LF line feeds and possibly parity bits. It's not something I usually do. I can run it on my Nokia phone too.

TPU was a very interesting beast. I moved from EDT to EVE via TPU. One interesting and useful thing was the full edit history log. The VMS filesystem was a version control system too, in that it kept every previous version of the file you edited, just with a numeric extension (;1 ;2 ;3 and so on). So you could, and people did, take up the edit history in the editor, edit the history, then apply the modified history on the previous version of the original file you edited. And get a different version.

[EugeneNine]

Other than the newer firefox I don't have any issues with responsiveness.

[Aaendi]

In my opinion, responsiveness has been getting better, but only because of how bad Windows 95 and 98 were.

[EugeneNine]

That may be the difference, I don't run windows.
My work laptop runs windows 7 with only 16G of ram so the hdd light flashes all day long as it swaps, there can be delays of several seconds just right clicking on things, windows it pretty bad.
My cheap used laptop running Linux with 4G of ram is much more responsive.

[White Flame]

Speaking of which, I think moving to an SSD has had the most drastic improvement for responsiveness in modern times, even on systems that never hit swap.

[GARTHWILSON]

How can that be, if my hard-disc light is not coming on when the computer is keeping me waiting?

[DerTrueForce]

16GB of RAM and a HDD thrashing problem? Sounds like there's something else going on in there, EugeneNine. I run Win7 on 8GB of RAM, and I don't get that.

[Tor]

16GB, swapping all the time.. it's simply because of browser memory leaks. I have to restart my chromium tabs (ff was even worse) every couple of weeks.

[EugeneNine]

Its a company owned system, so much crap on it but then the normal windows issue of swapping when using only half of the ram. Windows 2000 had a registry key allowing control of the amount of ram to use before swapping but XP and later took that away.

Microsoft visual studio is a pig, right click and 3-4 seconds later the menu finally comes up.

[Alarm Siren]

As DerTrueForce said, if you've got 16GB of RAM and you've got disk thrashing, the problem isn't windows itself. Provided you're not doing anything serious, 4GB is enough for a decent windows system, 8 if you do "serious work". I do have 16GB in my system, but that's only for the benefit of one specific application, nothing else even comes close to using the 8 let alone 16.

Also, you do know that you can completely disable the harddisk paging? Literally the first thing I ever do when setting up a new system: saves space on the SSD and forces the system to make full use of the installed RAM.