It was written in the 1960s by Hamish Dewar, an experienced Compiler writer and used this skill to design a command-set which could be easily parsed and coded to allow complex commands to be built up.
[2] H Dewar used his talent as a compiler author to create ECCE as a much more capable command set but retain a small footprint.
[2] ECCE became the default text editor for computers at the University of Edinburgh and remained almost unchanged for a period of almost 25 years.
The editors survival is attributed to the fact that thousands of undergraduates and postgraduates would have used the tool in their higher education and wherever in the world they settled the benefits of ECCE were promoted and local implementations created from Hamish Dewar's source code.
ECCE was originally written in Imp, a language created at the University of Edinburgh, the second implementation was coded in PDP-8 assembler and was ported to numerous other platforms.