I was introduced to the Software Tools Subsystem on the Prime P750 at Westfield College (University of London) in 1981. We were all given login accounts on the Prime, which ran a multi-user operating system called Primos. But the college wanted a more Unix-like environment, so they installed Software Tools and told everybody to type ‘swt’ as soon as they had logged in. This started up Software Tools, and gave access to the Screen Editor.

The Screen Editor was written as an improved version of the Software Tools line editor, ‘ste’. It accepted all the same commands as the line editor, but it displayed a full screen of text and gave much better feedback to the user.

Remember that the first version of this program was written in 1980!

Here at last is version 2.10 of the Software Tools Screen Editor, better known as se. I've finally got round to combining the eight different versions that have been lying around on various machines (and Exabyte tapes) for years! What I havn't yet done is to make any fixes or improvements to the code — that'll happen in version 2.20.

One very handy thing that this version includes is documentation in HTML. Not only can you read and print out se docs with your browser, you can read them on-line here.

Without further ado, here are the source code archives:

• For Windows and DOS: se210src.zip (394,195 bytes) last update: 6th April 1999
• For Unix and Linux: se210src.tar.gz (345,277 bytes) last update: 6th April 1999

• For Unix and Linux: se220.tar.gz (322,272 bytes) last update: 27th September 2001