NE is a text editor that was originally designed to run on a wide variety of machines, from large servers to personal workstations. In the past it ran on a number of operating systems; however, the current version supports only Unix-like systems. The main use of NE is expected to be as an interactive screen editor. However, it can also function as a line-by-line editor, and it is programmable, so it can be run non-interactively as a text manipulation tool. NE is a re-implementation of a previous editor that was called E, which in turn evolved from one called Zed and a number of predecessors that ran on IBM mainframes. The lineage can be traced back to some very early Cambridge text editors of the 1960s.