DIRED history

[larsbrinkhoff]

Some notes about various versions of DIRED.

[larsbrinkhoff]

The earliest files I find are Lebling's ITS program written in assembly language. (Possibly there were earlier versions which would have been stored on now long lost DECtapes.)

.INFO.; DIRED ORDER - 1972-09-14
SYS; TS DIRED - 1972-10-06
SYSENG; DIRED MDL121 - 1972-10-12

The source file says DIRED MDL001 P. D. LEBLING (PDL) 28 FEB 72 which looks like a good date for the first version. Note that PDL is David Lebling. The second file name say MDL and a version number. In this context, M means a file written in MIDAS assembly language, and DL indicates the author David Lebling.

Lebling writes: I don't think there was any interaction with SAIL regarding DIRED. I came up with the idea of DIRED on my own: I was tired of all the typing one had to do to manipulate multiple files using MONIT (the DM shell) or DDT (the AI Lab shell).

[larsbrinkhoff]

Next is Kugell's SAIL program, also in assembly language:

DIRED[SGK,69] - 1974-08-08

Kugell writes: I have no recollection of DIRED at project MAC before Stallman ported it. Did Lebling’s DIRED do the same thing? In a way it wouldn’t be a big surprise. The time was right for it.

[larsbrinkhoff]

Back at MIT, a DIRED was added to TMACS, which was a set of ^R mode macros for TECO. It was not present it the earliest versions, but 221 has it:

.TECO.; [MMAC] 221 - 1975-12-09

Message text found:

ECC@MIT-ML 08/27/75 21:11:16 Re: MM DIRED
To: TMACS at MIT-ML
Now installed in [MMAC] (PURE).  Escape types (as before)
the list of files to be deleted, asking for confirmation.
This can be: Y (delete them), X (exit, aborting MM DIRED),
or anything-else (resume MM DIRED).

Explanation: MM is a TECO macro which calls a named function. It's a precursor to M-x in Emacs.

[larsbrinkhoff]

Bouncing back to SAIL, a new version of DIRED was written in SAIL. (Confused yet?)

DIRED.SAIL[RS,1] - 1975-01-23

It doesn't seem to have much in common with this TOPS-20 DIRED from the Panda distribution. That one claims 1976-04-26.

[larsbrinkhoff]

Of course, MM DIRED was quickly converted to EMACS:

EMACS; DIRED 25 - 1976-11-27

This message indicates it was working two weeks earlier or so:

MOON@MIT-AI 11/14/76 04:40:49 Re: Changes
To: INFO-E at MIT-AI
[1] RMS's many bug fixes and changes of this afternoon compiled and
installed.
[2] MM LIST FILES renamed to MM LIST LOADED FILES
[3] New MM macros:
LIST FILES compact directory listing
LIST DIRECTORIES compact, sorted listing of M.F.D.
LIST TECO FS FLAGS compact, sorted listing of Teco FS flags
DUMP RMAIL don’t try it!
RMAIL temporary access to rmail – seems to have
a few bugs. In particular, don’t try
to get the minibuffer inside rmail's ^R
command – you’ll be sorry!
EDIT ..D edit the delimiter table
VIEW Q-REGISTER try to view any type of Q-register
[4] Note that MM LIST should be an acceptable
abbreviation for most such commands. Note that RMAIL needs
to be rewritten.
[5] For those who don’t know MM DIRED has worked for a few days.

[larsbrinkhoff]

Information from David Lebling and Stan Kugell is that they didn't know about each other's DIRED.

[larsbrinkhoff]

Later dired developments can be found on @ThomasDickey's web page:
https://invisible-island.net/ded/dating-dired.html

[larsbrinkhoff]

Information from Eugene Ciccarelli (ECC above):

my work on Dired was on the pre-EMacs TMacs code.

I definitely was not the first to write Dired. Can’t remember who did.
But the original had immediate commands - D immediately deleted the file -
and immediate updates of the screen to show the file line gone. That was an
issue for me since redrawing that large part of the directory was slow.
So I made an early change to simply mark the file as deleted - put a D at
the beginning of the file’s line so only that one line had to be redrawn.
Shortly thereafter one of us realized that we didn’t have to delete the file
immediately - the D there could be a plan of action instead of a record of
past action.