There was a discussion to day on a the Facebook CS Educators group about project based learning. This was initiated based on the College Board's desire to more more project work in some classes including APCS-A. Most, actually I think all of the educators on the forum agreed that students creating projects are a good idea but the bone of contention was over real world projects vs what I'll call practice projects.

JCS's post on Irreal today brought me back. It was about Brief which was the editing hotness back in the day. I played with it a little really mostly used Emacs clones for real work when I was stuck on MS-DOS systems. Usually either JOVE or Epsilon In the comments Jon reminded me about the MKS Toolkit which brought most everyday Unix tools to DOS along with a shell and a version of Vi.