I can't get it –
No Edlin for Macintosh?

Only a few times in your life, you'll find an application that is just outstanding in every way.
Most of them will be ported to other computer systems sometime. Hey, is there any computer system out there that doesn't have a PacMan clone?

But there is an application that was available for DOS that hasn't been ported to MacOS yet. As far as I know.

You see, back when most PCs were running MS-DOS, there was a formidable text editor called Edlin, made by Microsoft (and I always felt that Microsoft should get a new name: TCTBYE, The Company That Brought You Edlin). A text editor was very important since you always had to edit your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files to enhance your computer's performance – and you did achieve astonishing things by that, e.g. getting additional 4K of free memory or slowing doing your 16 MHz CPU to 4.77 MHz because you were getting dizzy watching your computer work at such a tremedous speed.

Working with Edlin was most comfortable.
Don't you get confused, too, if you look at all that lines of code in your current text editor?
What's even worse: Those editors allow you to open up a lot of files at the same time! Who's capable of remebering which file exactly it is that you're editing?

Well, that surely wouldn't happen using Edlin since it showed you a single line from a single file. All you had to to was to tell Edlin: »Please show me line 31 of that file« and bingo! you got it. You could edit that line and then save it. And if you wanted to edit line 32 afterwards, you simple had to open that very line...
 

And now I'm working with Macintosh computers and there's no Edlin so I have to work with Pepper or BBEdit or such overpowered applications.
But I still don't know why there's no Edlin for Macintosh – c'mon, it can't be that hard to build a decent Macintosh clone... Probably RealBasic is sufficient to do it!

And I already know the perfect name for it: Madlin.
That's the one and only appropiate name for it, because it's short for Macintosh Edlin – and because of other obvious reasons...
 
 

What's left to say?

• Please excuse my poor english.
• To all the Macintosh programmers out there:
  Do think about writing Madlin (of course, if you do, it should run with MacOS 9 and MacOS X) – I know nobody needs it, but isn't it worth the joke?

This page is a part of
http://www.tobias-jung.de
contact author: mail@tobias-jung.de