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In the early 1970s Robert Boyer and J Strother Moore, of Boyer-Moore string-search fame, wrote an editor based on a data structure that allowed to process text larger than memory.

Strother Moore joined Xerox PARC in 1974 and presented the data structure at a meeting. Charles Simonyi called the data structure "piece table" and experimented with TXDT, an Interlisp library Strother Moore wrote to demonstrate these ideas.

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The piece table helped Simonyi solve the memory limitations he faced with Butler Lampson to develop Bravo, the first WYSIWYG editor, for the Alto computer. The TEdit WYSIWYG editor of Medley also had the piece table at its core.

Simonyi later moved to Microsoft where he used the piece table to create Word which still uses the data structure. TEdit does too.

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Strother Moore described TXDT in a technical report:

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-81-2_The_TXDT_Package.pdf

We still have the Interlisp code of TXDT:

https://github.com/Interlisp/history/blob/master/1980s/1984-lispusers/TXDT.10.1

Strother Moore told this story here:

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~moore/best-ideas/structure-sharing/text-editing.html

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