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Who Made That Escape Key?[^]
"Why "escape"? Bemer could have used another word - say, "interrupt" - but he opted for "ESC," a tiny monument to his own angst. Bemer was a worrier."
/ravi
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Quote: “There’s something nice about having a get-me-the-hell-out-of-here key.”
Agreed
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Brings back memories of TECO - Text Editor and COrrector. A single ESC meant to exit text insertion mode and return to command mode. Hitting the ESC key twice in a row signaled TECO to execute the command you just typed.
TECO was a very powerful and dangerous editor. Powerful because almost every key on the keyboard was a valid command. Dangerous because it was a pure interpreter that only stopped executing commands when it either encountered an error or completed executing all the commands, combined with almost every key being a valid command, a minor typo could, and often did, make a huge mess of whatever you were editing.
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I remember TECO! Never used it, though. Used SOS for a while then switched to EDT, and later LSE. IIRC, TECO and Emacs had a lot in common. They were both so powerful, it was rumored you could use either editor to fry an egg. 
/ravi
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Ravi,
TECO was implemented on almost all the DEC operating systems. I liked it because it didn't matter whether I was using RSTS, RSX, RT11, TOPS-10, TOPS-20, or VMS, it was still pretty much the same editor. You must have encountered it on VMS. I believe there was even an implementation for Windows.
Yes, TECO and EMACS are similar in philosophy.
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Yes, I saw it in the early days of VMS (2.0).
/ravi
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I dunno, my experience has been the use of the Esc keycode to start a series of device command characters, you know, Esc Sequences? Something that is considered FM (not frequency modulation, F**king Magic) nowadays.
Many have been the times my employers have snagged me to create them because they had no idea what they were or how to use them.
Before WYSIWYG, if you wanted bold or italics, you had to embed esc sequences in the character streams to the printers. Or to generate barcode, or have a printer connected to a terminal and you wanted something printed instead of displayed on the terminal.
Psychosis at 10
Film at 11
Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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BrainiacV wrote: I dunno, my experience has been the use of the Esc keycode to start a series of device command characters
I think we're both old as dirt. 
I did a lot of hacking using ESC codes on the VT100, VT102 and VT50 (graphics terminal). I still remember ESC[K (erase to end of line) and ESC[2J (erase entire line without moving cursor), ESC[H (move cursor to start of line, and other equally (now) useless information.
/ravi
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As my grandchildren say, "No confession, no case."
No, wait..
Psychosis at 10
Film at 11
Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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If the astronauts in “2001: A Space Odyssey” had an ESC key, Dennerlein points out, they could have stopped the rogue computer Hal in an instant.
A nice reminder that robots must have an Esc button also.
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