Ars Technica reports that Microsoft has just released (or re-released, sort of) the MS-DOS Editor that shipped in 1991 with MS-DOS 5.0. I used that version of MS-DOS, and remember it pretty fondly, even though by then I was mostly using Macs. And I even remember the editor, which in those days was just called “The MS-DOS Editor.” The new release retains that approach to naming; it’s just called “Edit.“
The Ars Technica article also mentions something I didn’t know; the MS-DOS 5.0 version of the editor was a special mode of the QBasic editor. In those days MS-DOS (and most of its competitors) shipped with some version of the BASIC language. The editor in those days was a transitional design based on the idea that even though MS-DOS was a command-line system, most PC-compatible computers by 1991 had a mouse connected.
I haven’t used a Microsoft operating system in quite a few years, but good news: Edit will run perfectly well in Linux and even MacOS. As Benji Edwards points out, “most fundamental aspects of text editing haven’t changed much despite 34 years of tech evolution.”
Image from Microsoft via Ars Technica.
