The Beginnings of TECO

I came up with the name TECO in 1962 while sitting in Ye Hong Guey, my favorite restaurant in Boston’s Chinatown during my undergraduate years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I had been working on a little program to help me write other programs, a common activity in the day when a computer (the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1) would be delivered with almost no software. My program had gotten to the point that it needed a name, so my friend Pete Peterson and I were kicking around possibilities and their acronyms. Years later, TECO would be known to mean Text Editor and Corrector and so described in its documentation. However, the original meaning—the one we came up with that night at the corner of Oxford and Beach streets—was Tape Editor and Corrector.