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July 24th, 2024

The Origin of Emacs in 1976

EMACS was developed in 1976 at MIT AI Lab, with Richard Stallman's significant involvement. Guy Steele's records shed light on early development, emphasizing RMS's pivotal role in transforming TECO macros into a powerful editor.

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The Origin of Emacs in 1976

In 1976, EMACS was developed at the MIT AI Lab, with Richard Stallman (RMS) playing a significant role in its development. The origin of EMACS has been documented by various individuals, including a thread on Dan Weinreb's blog, preserved by archive.org. Guy Steele's records, including printed emails, shed light on the early days of EMACS, showing that RMS, with help from others like GLS, MOON, and JLK, contributed to its development. Moon's involvement was clarified, with RMS credited for the names "E" and "EMACS." Despite some historical debates, RMS is acknowledged for transforming TECO macros into a powerful editor through extensive effort and collaboration with the early user community. The AI lab culture emphasized collective contributions, with RMS recognized as a key figure in EMACS' evolution. The historical information provided by Guy Steele offers valuable insights into the collaborative efforts behind EMACS' creation, highlighting RMS's pivotal role in its development.

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Link Icon 8 comments
By @jhallenworld - 4 months
The TECO version of EMACS is always a kick to look at, here is the dired code:

http://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/mit_emacs_170_teco_1220/01/e...

From this we can conclude that humans do not need any nice things like programming languages, assemblers or compilers to program effectively.

By @lkrubner - 4 months
About this:

    To: CBF at MIT-AI, EAK at MIT-AI, ED at MIT-AI, MOON ay MIT-AI
Does anyone know if this is literally how they wrote email addresses in 1976? Instead of using the @ symbol they typed the word "at"?

I realize this was before DNS was invented, so I am not surprised by the lack of TLD.

By @ggm - 4 months
On FreeBSD /usr/ports/editors/teco still works if you want to try your name and $ to see what awesome edit happens (my name starting with g I think means its g(lobally) applied)

Interesting to see '76 email formats had To: and CC: but not Subject: and Date: info was rolled into what now we might call the Envelope, projected into the header.

I used EMAS and Vax/VMS based email in '79 which was sufficiently second-system to have a standard to implement against and Type:Value was in, with Date: and Subject:

By @SoftTalker - 4 months
I'm nearly 60 years old. I used emacs in school and I still use it every day today. Along with the unix shells and utility commands, I can't think of any other software I've consistenty used for all those years. They really did it right with that stuff.

Back in those days, csh was more popular as an interactive shell. sh was used more for scripting. At least that's what I recall. bash didn't exist yet.

By @zombiwoof - 4 months
I had always thought James Gosling helped create Emacs with Guy
By @sneed_chucker - 4 months
Is there any point in learning emacs in 2024?

I know vi/vim pretty well, but I've never bothered with emacs much since the multi key stroke navigation just seems so unergonomic to me.

By @awahab92 - 4 months
would it be a bad idea to rewrite the emacsLisp interpreter and other OS parts in a multi-core friendly language like preferably GO but rust would work too?

my reasoning is that it would add another 100 years to the shelf life of emacs. its good enough i dont have any reason to switch, but if the single threaded perf i s still a bottleneck in 5 years i'd probably switch to ZED.