We here at the Pluralist Network are huge fans of Line Editors. We have studied and written about ed, the standard editor, extensively. So naturally when Microsoft open-sourced MS-DOS 4.0, which included EDLIN, we were quite excited.
We share the excitement of being able to read EDLIN’s source code as shared with us by @bcantrill https://twitter.com/bcantrill/status/1783684972542582968
EDLIN was a line editor developed by Microsoft for early versions of MS-DOS and PC DOS. It was created in 1980 by Tim Paterson. At the time Tom worked for Seattle Computer Products. He designed EDLIN for QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) aka 86-DOS, which was later sold to Microsoft and became MS-DOS. EDLIN was included to provide a basic text editing tool for managing configuration files and other simple text files on early PCs.