The editor was very basic, but surprisingly good. I used it this year on CP/M on my RC2014. The whole IDE was pretty great, given that it also included a fast compiler.<p>I don't think the intent of this whole thing is to say that there is no point in modern improvements. But it _is_ good to have some reference on how much we used to get done with so little. Those several decades of complexity growth are buying us some stuff, but maybe not as much as we think.
What these legacy comparisons often miss: for human use, you also need documentation (and sometimes even things like error messages). This was not part of the binary, but delivered on paper. The manuals were much larger than the binary.