The Quick EDitor (QED) - History

[Copyright 1999,2002 Frank Durda IV, All Rights Reserved.
Mirroring of any material on this site in any form is expressly prohibited.
The official web site for this material is:  http://nemesis.lonestar.org
Contact this address for use clearances: clearance at nemesis.lonestar.org
Comments and queries to this address: web_software_2011 at nemesis.lonestar.org]

What is QED?

QED is a no-frills, screen-oriented text editor, designed for the first-time assembly language programmer, and in some cases, first-time computer user. It is written in Z80 Assembly language, and was developed for the Tandy TRS-80 Model 4/4D/4P platform.

QED provides a interface similar to the LED editor from Misosys. It provides a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get view of the file being edited.

Why does QED exist?

The QED editor, along with the QD assembler were written over the labor day weekend of 1985. At that time, I had taken a job as a part-time instructor at the Tarrant County Junior College, and had discovered that the campus computer laboratory was seriously under-equipped. The lab did have ten Model 4 computers, but the school had only purchased four copies of CP/M, so if you used CP/M, only four systems could be used at a time. My class had 32 students, and there were two other classes on the same subject being taught by others. So approximately 90 students would be fighting for four "usable" computers and software, while six other working machines sat idle.

As a part-time instructor, I had no standing of any sort, so getting the college to buy more software was not an option.

Therefore, I elected to write an assembler and editor that would have no licensing or royalty problems, and since each Model 4 system came with a licensed copy of TRSDOS 6, that would be used as the operating system.

Because of the syllabus I had to keep the class on, the first lab would begin the Tuesday after labor day, so any replacement software had to be available by then. The lack of equipment was discovered the Thursday evening before the labor day weekend.

The QED (Quick EDitor) editor and the QD* (Quick and Dirty) 8080 assembler were used by my class for that semester, allowing my students to have access to all ten lab systems. The software was offered to the other instructors, but the instructors did not want to have to learn TRSDOS 6, so they stuck with CP/M, limiting their students to four of the ten lab systems. For some reason, my class got a lot further through the book than the other classes...

* The QD assembler was written in BASIC, and is discussed elsewhere.

What eventually happened to QED?

After the fall semester of 1985, the college dropped the 8080 assembly language courses from their program, so QED was not used in a school environment again.

In December of 1998, the original QED and QD development diskettes were recovered from storage. Two commands that were never written (Move and Copy) were written in early 1999, and all the material was made available via the World Wide Web. The official home for this and related material is http://nemesis.lonestar.org

[Copyright 2000,2002 Frank Durda IV, All Rights Reserved.
Mirroring of any material on this site in any form is expressly prohibited.
The official web site for this material is:  http://nemesis.lonestar.org
Contact this address for use clearances: clearance at nemesis.lonestar.org
Comments and queries to this address: web_software_2011 at nemesis.lonestar.org]

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