TECO (text editor)

Original author(s)Dan Murphy
Initial release1962/63
Operating systemOS/8, ITS, TOPS-10, TOPS-20, RT-11, RSTS/E, RSX-11, OpenVMS, Multics
TypeText editor

TECO (/ˈtiːkoʊ/[1]), short for Text Editor & Corrector, [2] [3][4] is both a character-oriented text editor and a programming language,[5][6] that was developed in 1962 for use on Digital Equipment Corporation computers, and has since become available on PCs and Unix. Dan Murphy developed TECO while a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).[5]

According to Murphy, the initial acronym was Tape Editor and Corrector because "punched paper tape was the only medium for the storage of program source on our PDP-1. There was no hard disk, floppy disk, magnetic tape (magtape), or network."[5] By the time TECO was made available for general use, the name had become "Text Editor and Corrector",[4] since even the PDP-1 version by then supported other media.[5] It was subsequently modified by many other people[7] and is a direct ancestor of Emacs, which was originally implemented in TECO macros.[8][9][10]

  1. ^ "DEC Timesharing". The DEC Professional. Tee'koh
  2. ^ "A powerful and sophisticated text editor, TECO (Text Editor and Corrector) ... Bell, C. Gordon; Mudge, J. Craig; McNamara, John E. (2014). Computer Engineering: A DEC View of Hardware Systems Design. Digital Press. ISBN 978-1483221106. See also Bell, C. Gordon; Mudge, J. Craig; McNamara, John E. (1978). Computer Engineering: A DEC View of Hardware Systems Design. Elsevier Science & Technology Books. ISBN 9780932376008.
  3. ^ The name on the cover of DEC's DEC-10-UTECA-A-D manual is "Introduction To TECO (Text Editor And Corrector)"
  4. ^ a b PDP 8/e small computer handbook. 1970. pp. 2–30.
  5. ^ a b c d Murphy, Dan (October–December 2009). "The Beginnings of TECO" (PDF). IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 31 (4): 110–115. doi:10.1109/mahc.2009.127. S2CID 18805607.
  6. ^ citing Comm. of the ACM (see vol. 19, no. 12, 1976)
  7. ^ "TECO". The Jargon File. v.4.4.7. ibiblio.
  8. ^ "A History of EMACS".
  9. ^ Mario Biagioli; Peter Jaszi; Martha Woodmansee (2015). Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property: Creative Production. ISBN 022617249X. EMACS was originally built on top of TECO
  10. ^ Harley Hahn (2016). Harley Hahn's Emacs Field Guide. Apress. p. 9. ISBN 978-1484217030.