TextEdit has its roots in OPENSTEP, where it was used as kind of a demo application of the text views IIRC. It even came with source code, as did Chess by the way.
So I guess a comparison between TextEdit and Pages doesn't make too much sense probably, they're really different things.
> TextEdit [...] was used as kind of a demo application of the text views IIRC. even came with source code, as did Chess by the way.
On the other side of the fence, WordPad initially came with source code as well, and was essentially a demo app for the rich edit control as well as the criminally underused text converters[1].
Source code, published until OS X 10.9: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/samplecode/TextE...
>a comparison between TextEdit and Pages doesn't make too much sense probably, they're really different things
Both can and are be used for writing, and for basic rich text editing, on top of the other stuff Pages can do, so it makes total sense to compare them for this purpose.
It's not like we're comparing Excel vs Lightroom.