[TUHS] emacs

[TUHS] emacs

[Will Senn]

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As a longtime user and lover of ed/ex/vi, I don't know much about emacs, 
but lately I've been using it more (as it seems like any self-respecting 
lisper, has to at least have a passing acquaintance with it). I recently 
went off and got MACLISP running in ITS. As part of that exploration, I 
used EMACS, but not just any old emacs, emacs in it's first incarnation 
as a set of TECO macros. To me, it just seemed like EMACS. I won't bore 
you with the details - imagine lots of control and escape sequences, 
many of which are the same today as then. This was late 70's stuff.

My question for the group is - when did emacs arrive in unix and was it 
a full fledged text editor when it came or was it sitting on top of some 
other subssystem in unix? Was TECO ever on unix?

Will

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[TUHS] Re: emacs

[Adam Thornton]

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There are certainly teco implementations for Unix, although I don't know if
it was ever anyone's default editor anywhere.  Indeed, there are multiple
implementations: I switched from a C teco implementation to pyteco in the
Rubin Science Platform JupyterLab implementation (its utility is of course
dubious, but this is part of both my nefarious plan to make Jupyter not
merely mean "Julia, Python, and R", but to use that "e" -- and reassociate
it with the "t" -- by making it mean "Julia, Python, Teco, and R", and also
to include an easter egg for a fellow project member who is a teco fan).

The first Emacs I used was GNU emacs at already version...16 or something?
In 1989, on ... I don't remember what the main system I used at the UT
Austin Chaos Lab was, actually; we had an SGI Iris, but that wasn't the
machine I did my editing on.  But by 1989 it was certainly well-available
and established.

On Thu, Aug 3, 2023 at 5:04 PM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:

> As a longtime user and lover of ed/ex/vi, I don't know much about emacs,
> but lately I've been using it more (as it seems like any self-respecting
> lisper, has to at least have a passing acquaintance with it). I recently
> went off and got MACLISP running in ITS. As part of that exploration, I
> used EMACS, but not just any old emacs, emacs in it's first incarnation as
> a set of TECO macros. To me, it just seemed like EMACS. I won't bore you
> with the details - imagine lots of control and escape sequences, many of
> which are the same today as then. This was late 70's stuff.
>
> My question for the group is - when did emacs arrive in unix and was it a
> full fledged text editor when it came or was it sitting on top of some
> other subssystem in unix? Was TECO ever on unix?
>
> Will
>

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[TUHS] Re: emacs

[Rob Pike]

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There was a guy in production at Google using Unix TECO as his main editor
when I joined in 2002. He was astonished that I recognized it, but I had
used TECO in the early 1970s and, although I had no desire to return to it,
I did know it well enough to exclaim its presence when watching over his
shoulder.

So yes, apologies for not remembering his name, but it was at least one
person's default editor.

-rob


On Fri, Aug 4, 2023 at 10:19 AM Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:

> There are certainly teco implementations for Unix, although I don't know
> if it was ever anyone's default editor anywhere.  Indeed, there are
> multiple implementations: I switched from a C teco implementation to pyteco
> in the Rubin Science Platform JupyterLab implementation (its utility is of
> course dubious, but this is part of both my nefarious plan to make Jupyter
> not merely mean "Julia, Python, and R", but to use that "e" -- and
> reassociate it with the "t" -- by making it mean "Julia, Python, Teco, and
> R", and also to include an easter egg for a fellow project member who is a
> teco fan).
>
> The first Emacs I used was GNU emacs at already version...16 or
> something?  In 1989, on ... I don't remember what the main system I used at
> the UT Austin Chaos Lab was, actually; we had an SGI Iris, but that wasn't
> the machine I did my editing on.  But by 1989 it was certainly
> well-available and established.
>
> On Thu, Aug 3, 2023 at 5:04 PM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> As a longtime user and lover of ed/ex/vi, I don't know much about emacs,
>> but lately I've been using it more (as it seems like any self-respecting
>> lisper, has to at least have a passing acquaintance with it). I recently
>> went off and got MACLISP running in ITS. As part of that exploration, I
>> used EMACS, but not just any old emacs, emacs in it's first incarnation as
>> a set of TECO macros. To me, it just seemed like EMACS. I won't bore you
>> with the details - imagine lots of control and escape sequences, many of
>> which are the same today as then. This was late 70's stuff.
>>
>> My question for the group is - when did emacs arrive in unix and was it a
>> full fledged text editor when it came or was it sitting on top of some
>> other subssystem in unix? Was TECO ever on unix?
>>
>> Will
>>
>

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[TUHS] Re: emacs

[Larry McVoy]

I have yet to see someone see the stuff I use from BDS C's editor, here is
vi's version:

map # :.,$
map @ :1,.

And from Udi Manber, I watched him do this and said how the heck did you
make that paragraph reformat?

map , !}fmt^M

Sory, not TECO, but editor stuff.  I'll bow out.

On Fri, Aug 04, 2023 at 10:27:52AM +1000, Rob Pike wrote:
> There was a guy in production at Google using Unix TECO as his main editor
> when I joined in 2002. He was astonished that I recognized it, but I had
> used TECO in the early 1970s and, although I had no desire to return to it,
> I did know it well enough to exclaim its presence when watching over his
> shoulder.
> 
> So yes, apologies for not remembering his name, but it was at least one
> person's default editor.
> 
> -rob
> 
> 
> On Fri, Aug 4, 2023 at 10:19???AM Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > There are certainly teco implementations for Unix, although I don't know
> > if it was ever anyone's default editor anywhere.  Indeed, there are
> > multiple implementations: I switched from a C teco implementation to pyteco
> > in the Rubin Science Platform JupyterLab implementation (its utility is of
> > course dubious, but this is part of both my nefarious plan to make Jupyter
> > not merely mean "Julia, Python, and R", but to use that "e" -- and
> > reassociate it with the "t" -- by making it mean "Julia, Python, Teco, and
> > R", and also to include an easter egg for a fellow project member who is a
> > teco fan).
> >
> > The first Emacs I used was GNU emacs at already version...16 or
> > something?  In 1989, on ... I don't remember what the main system I used at
> > the UT Austin Chaos Lab was, actually; we had an SGI Iris, but that wasn't
> > the machine I did my editing on.  But by 1989 it was certainly
> > well-available and established.
> >
> > On Thu, Aug 3, 2023 at 5:04???PM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> As a longtime user and lover of ed/ex/vi, I don't know much about emacs,
> >> but lately I've been using it more (as it seems like any self-respecting
> >> lisper, has to at least have a passing acquaintance with it). I recently
> >> went off and got MACLISP running in ITS. As part of that exploration, I
> >> used EMACS, but not just any old emacs, emacs in it's first incarnation as
> >> a set of TECO macros. To me, it just seemed like EMACS. I won't bore you
> >> with the details - imagine lots of control and escape sequences, many of
> >> which are the same today as then. This was late 70's stuff.
> >>
> >> My question for the group is - when did emacs arrive in unix and was it a
> >> full fledged text editor when it came or was it sitting on top of some
> >> other subssystem in unix? Was TECO ever on unix?
> >>
> >> Will
> >>
> >

-- 
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: emacs

[Rich Salz]

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The Wikipedia articles give a good overview
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Corporation_of_America
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs

We had one of the first Pyramid minicomputers, so we got lots of stuff to
port.

RMS claimed he modified the earlier, freely redistributable, version of
Gosling Emacs, not the one Unipress sold.
The skull and crossbones referenced above is at
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/skull-and-crossbones.txt

Years later, Lucid forked it (now at xemacs.org) and the personalities
involved caused the "great Emacs schism"  A pox on both their houses, I say
:)

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[TUHS] Re: emacs

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Rich Salz wrote:
> RMS claimed he modified the earlier, freely redistributable, version
> of Gosling Emacs, not the one Unipress sold.  The skull and crossbones
> referenced above is at
> https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/skull-and-crossbones.txt

It's still there in GNU Emacs 13:
https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history/blob/sources/decuslib.com/decus/vax85b/gnuemax/emacs/src/display.c#L29-L67

[TUHS] Re: emacs

[Warner Losh]

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On Thu, Aug 3, 2023, 6:19 PM Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:

> There are certainly teco implementations for Unix, although I don't know
> if it was ever anyone's default editor anywhere.  Indeed, there are
> multiple implementations: I switched from a C teco implementation to pyteco
> in the Rubin Science Platform JupyterLab implementation (its utility is of
> course dubious, but this is part of both my nefarious plan to make Jupyter
> not merely mean "Julia, Python, and R", but to use that "e" -- and
> reassociate it with the "t" -- by making it mean "Julia, Python, Teco, and
> R", and also to include an easter egg for a fellow project member who is a
> teco fan).
>
> The first Emacs I used was GNU emacs at already version...16 or
> something?  In 1989, on ... I don't remember what the main system I used at
> the UT Austin Chaos Lab was, actually; we had an SGI Iris, but that wasn't
> the machine I did my editing on.  But by 1989 it was certainly
> well-available and established.
>

We used some stripped down emacs in 1985 on the vax 11/750 running 4.2bsd.
 I built micro emacs for my DEC Rainbow under MS-DOS in the same time
period...

Warner

On Thu, Aug 3, 2023 at 5:04 PM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> As a longtime user and lover of ed/ex/vi, I don't know much about emacs,
>> but lately I've been using it more (as it seems like any self-respecting
>> lisper, has to at least have a passing acquaintance with it). I recently
>> went off and got MACLISP running in ITS. As part of that exploration, I
>> used EMACS, but not just any old emacs, emacs in it's first incarnation as
>> a set of TECO macros. To me, it just seemed like EMACS. I won't bore you
>> with the details - imagine lots of control and escape sequences, many of
>> which are the same today as then. This was late 70's stuff.
>>
>> My question for the group is - when did emacs arrive in unix and was it a
>> full fledged text editor when it came or was it sitting on top of some
>> other subssystem in unix? Was TECO ever on unix?
>>
>> Will
>>
>

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[TUHS] Re: emacs

[Larry Stewart]

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[TUHS] Re: emacs

[Ronald Natalie]

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I started with Warren Montgomery’s EMACS.    Prior to that, my entire 
screen oriented experience was with INed (a variant of the Rand editor). 
    BRL largely switched to the free Gosling’s emacs and then later to 
Unipress.    I ended up working for Unipress for a few months.   Oddly, 
I ended up using JOVE (Johnathon’s Own Version of Emacs) because it is a 
small lightweight thing to move around.

Consequently, I never used leaned vi.   If there was no emacs variant on 
the machine, I used ed.   My employees were quite impressed by my 
ability to do complex editing with ed and regular expressions there.

-Ron

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[TUHS] Re: emacs

[Will Senn]

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Nice. the Rainbow was my first working PC. I loved it. It had a math 
coprocessor (that  I upgraded), z80 and 8088, with 1MB ram (that I 
upgraded it to, from 128k), ran Autocad! MSDOS 3.10b, CP/M and it was 
the machine I used with a 300baud modem to download the pre 1.0 
slackware - kermit/xmodem through a VMS gateway to the internet - 
1993/1994. I didn't have emacs though! I think I remember Ultrix or 
something like that, but I didn't run it.

On 8/3/23 19:32, Warner Losh wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 3, 2023, 6:19 PM Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>     There are certainly teco implementations for Unix, although I
>     don't know if it was ever anyone's default editor aInywhere. 
>     Indeed, there are multiple implementations: I switched from a C
>     teco implementation to pyteco in the Rubin Science Platform
>     JupyterLab implementation (its utility is of course dubious, but
>     this is part of both my nefarious plan to make Jupyter not merely
>     mean "Julia, Python, and R", but to use that "e" -- and
>     reassociate it with the "t" -- by making it mean "Julia, Python,
>     Teco, and R", and also to include an easter egg for a fellow
>     project member who is a teco fan).
>
>     The first Emacs I used was GNU emacs at already version...16 or
>     something?  In 1989, on ... I don't remember what the main system
>     I used at the UT Austin Chaos Lab was, actually; we had an SGI
>     Iris, but that wasn't the machine I did my editing on.  But by
>     1989 it was certainly well-available and established.
>
>
> We used some stripped down emacs in 1985 on the vax 11/750 running 
> 4.2bsd.   I built micro emacs for my DEC Rainbow under MS-DOS in the 
> same time period...
>
> Warner
>
>     On Thu, Aug 3, 2023 at 5:04 PM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>         As a longtime user and lover of ed/ex/vi, I don't know much
>         about emacs, but lately I've been using it more (as it seems
>         like any self-respecting lisper, has to at least have a
>         passing acquaintance with it). I recently went off and got
>         MACLISP running in ITS. As part of that exploration, I used
>         EMACS, but not just any old emacs, emacs in it's first
>         incarnation as a set of TECO macros. To me, it just seemed
>         like EMACS. I won't bore you with the details - imagine lots
>         of control and escape sequences, many of which are the same
>         today as then. This was late 70's stuff.
>
>         My question for the group is - when did emacs arrive in unix
>         and was it a full fledged text editor when it came or was it
>         sitting on top of some other subssystem in unix? Was TECO ever
>         on unix?
>
>         Will
>

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[TUHS] Re: emacs

[Erik E. Fair]

I first learned original TECO-based EMACS on the Stanford CERAS DECsystem-20/60 running TOPS-20 during the summer of 1978 - I'd been using line-editors before that, and EMACS was a revelation. Heck, "intelligent" (CRT) terminals were a terrific replacement for teletypes, DECwriters, and "glass" TTYs.

When I got to UCB in the fall of 1980, it took until Winter quarter (1981) to get an account on the Cory Hall (EECS) PDP-11/70 running 2.8 BSD Unix, through the Berkeley Computer Club. The Warren Montgomery emacs was available, and since I already knew emacs keystrokes, that was my editor of choice ... initially. I converted to vi because I really hated having one finger on the CTRL key all day long.

It was also nice that the BSD tty line discpline displays what you type along the same lines as TOPS-20 did, including word-erase, though trying to use ^W that way in most emacs absolutely violates the Principle of Least Astonishment ... which if you've ever interacted with rms, should not really surprise given what he did with ^S, ^Q, and ^H.

Emacs has been available (in one form or another) on Unix for a very long time.

	Erik

[TUHS] Re: emacs

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Thursday,  3 August 2023 at 17:19:10 -0700, Adam Thornton wrote:
>
> The first Emacs I used was GNU emacs at already version...16 or something?
> In 1989,

Coincidentally that's when I first used GNU Emacs on a Unix-like
system (SCO Xenix, also coincidentally in Austin).  The version was
18.51.

But as Warner says, there were plenty of Emacs-lookalikes on other
platforms, notably MINCE (MINCE Is Not Complete Emacs) on the Z-80,
which I used from 1980, and others, including the micro Emacs that
Warner used.

The Emacs lineage (TECO → GNU Emacs) isn't as straight as it might
appear.  There was also a Gosling Emacs in the interim time, and I
gather that rms used some of the concepts (screen refresh?) for GNU
Emacs.  Also I recall that the version numbering was a little
defective, something like skipping a number of major version numbers
because it seemed that enough time had passed.  But I'm hazy on the
details, and maybe somebody else can fill in.

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
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[TUHS] Re: emacs

[Clem Cole]

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http://wiki.c2.com/?TecoEditor

Cantrell’s teco was pretty fast and used a lot less resources than any of
the Unix EMACS invocations.  Gosling / CMU EMACS showed up in 81 on the Vax
and is where mocklisp came from.   Zimmerman EMACS may have been earlier at
MIT but Steve sold it to CCA so it was not nearly as widespread. Noel may
know more. We got a license from CCA in ‘84 and shipped it on the Masscomp
systems.

Rms did like a number things gosling did and start to rewrite it.  (The
defaults were different from ITS was one of his issues). He released his
version around 85. FWIW:   There is still some bad blood wrt to that whole
path best I can tell.

I think there were a couple of others.


On Thu, Aug 3, 2023 at 8:04 PM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:

> As a longtime user and lover of ed/ex/vi, I don't know much about emacs,
> but lately I've been using it more (as it seems like any self-respecting
> lisper, has to at least have a passing acquaintance with it). I recently
> went off and got MACLISP running in ITS. As part of that exploration, I
> used EMACS, but not just any old emacs, emacs in it's first incarnation as
> a set of TECO macros. To me, it just seemed like EMACS. I won't bore you
> with the details - imagine lots of control and escape sequences, many of
> which are the same today as then. This was late 70's stuff.
>
> My question for the group is - when did emacs arrive in unix and was it a
> full fledged text editor when it came or was it sitting on top of some
> other subssystem in unix? Was TECO ever on unix?
>
>
> Will
>
-- 
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual

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[TUHS] Re: emacs

[Clem Cole]

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Rms did Not like.    Sigh

On Thu, Aug 3, 2023 at 8:44 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> http://wiki.c2.com/?TecoEditor
>
> Cantrell’s teco was pretty fast and used a lot less resources than any of
> the Unix EMACS invocations.  Gosling / CMU EMACS showed up in 81 on the Vax
> and is where mocklisp came from.   Zimmerman EMACS may have been earlier at
> MIT but Steve sold it to CCA so it was not nearly as widespread. Noel may
> know more. We got a license from CCA in ‘84 and shipped it on the Masscomp
> systems.
>
> Rms did like a number things gosling did and start to rewrite it.  (The
> defaults were different from ITS was one of his issues). He released his
> version around 85. FWIW:   There is still some bad blood wrt to that whole
> path best I can tell.
>
> I think there were a couple of others.
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 3, 2023 at 8:04 PM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> As a longtime user and lover of ed/ex/vi, I don't know much about emacs,
>> but lately I've been using it more (as it seems like any self-respecting
>> lisper, has to at least have a passing acquaintance with it). I recently
>> went off and got MACLISP running in ITS. As part of that exploration, I
>> used EMACS, but not just any old emacs, emacs in it's first incarnation as
>> a set of TECO macros. To me, it just seemed like EMACS. I won't bore you
>> with the details - imagine lots of control and escape sequences, many of
>> which are the same today as then. This was late 70's stuff.
>>
>> My question for the group is - when did emacs arrive in unix and was it a
>> full fledged text editor when it came or was it sitting on top of some
>> other subssystem in unix? Was TECO ever on unix?
>>
>>
>> Will
>>
> --
> Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
>
-- 
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual

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[TUHS] Re: emacs

[Warner Losh]

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On Thu, Aug 3, 2023, 6:44 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> http://wiki.c2.com/?TecoEditor
>
> Cantrell’s teco was pretty fast and used a lot less resources than any of
> the Unix EMACS invocations.  Gosling / CMU EMACS showed up in 81 on the Vax
> and is where mocklisp came from.   Zimmerman EMACS may have been earlier at
> MIT but Steve sold it to CCA so it was not nearly as widespread. Noel may
> know more. We got a license from CCA in ‘84 and shipped it on the Masscomp
> systems.
>
> Rms did like a number things gosling did and start to rewrite it.  (The
> defaults were different from ITS was one of his issues). He released his
> version around 85. FWIW:   There is still some bad blood wrt to that whole
> path best I can tell.
>

RMS started with Gosling's emacs, did a half-hearted rewrite by evolving
that code and claimed it all as his. Gosling was understandably upset by
this and made him stop. The release notes from the early teens of releases
document some of the drama. The last thing was the screen code and was
still a sticking point even after the rewrite... a lot happened on mailing
lists too, but I've not found those archives..

The ill will was well earned...

Warner


I think there were a couple of others.
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 3, 2023 at 8:04 PM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> As a longtime user and lover of ed/ex/vi, I don't know much about emacs,
>> but lately I've been using it more (as it seems like any self-respecting
>> lisper, has to at least have a passing acquaintance with it). I recently
>> went off and got MACLISP running in ITS. As part of that exploration, I
>> used EMACS, but not just any old emacs, emacs in it's first incarnation as
>> a set of TECO macros. To me, it just seemed like EMACS. I won't bore you
>> with the details - imagine lots of control and escape sequences, many of
>> which are the same today as then. This was late 70's stuff.
>>
>> My question for the group is - when did emacs arrive in unix and was it a
>> full fledged text editor when it came or was it sitting on top of some
>> other subssystem in unix? Was TECO ever on unix?
>>
>>
>> Will
>>
> --
> Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
>

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[TUHS] Re: emacs

[Dan Halbert]

On 8/3/23 20:44, Clem Cole wrote:
> Gosling / CMU EMACS showed up in 81 on the Vax and is where mocklisp 
> came from.

Do not forget Multics EMACS (1978), 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics_Emacs, written in Lisp by Bernie 
Greenberg, and the Lisp Machine emacsen, 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EINE_and_ZWEI, by the late Dan Weinreb. I 
knew the authors of both of these well.

Dan H

[TUHS] Re: emacs

[Bakul Shah]

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I had ported Gosling Emacs to Fortune System in 1981 or 82. It was painfully slow. I vaguely remember that was due to bitfields use, for which our C compiler (pcc based IIRC) did not generate good code. I gave up at that point as it was a side project & vi was more than good enough. Earlier I had used TECO (logged in to ITS from an IMP @ USC) but not emacs.

> On Aug 3, 2023, at 5:04 PM, Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> As a longtime user and lover of ed/ex/vi, I don't know much about emacs, but lately I've been using it more (as it seems like any self-respecting lisper, has to at least have a passing acquaintance with it). I recently went off and got MACLISP running in ITS. As part of that exploration, I used EMACS, but not just any old emacs, emacs in it's first incarnation as a set of TECO macros. To me, it just seemed like EMACS. I won't bore you with the details - imagine lots of control and escape sequences, many of which are the same today as then. This was late 70's stuff.
> 
> My question for the group is - when did emacs arrive in unix and was it a full fledged text editor when it came or was it sitting on top of some other subssystem in unix? Was TECO ever on unix?
> 
> Will


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[TUHS] Isaacson v Unix

[Doug McIlroy]

I was given a copy of Walter Isaacson's "The Innovators: How a Group of
Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution". It devotes
ten pages to Stallman and Gnu, Torvalds and Linux, even Tannebaum and
Minix, but never mentions Thompson and Ritchie. Unix is identified only
as a product from Bell Labs from which the others learned something--he
doesn't say what. I have heard also that Isaacson's "Idea Factory"
(about Bell Labs) barely mentions Unix. Is Isaacson blind, biased,
or merely brainwashed?

In the case of Steve Jobs, Isaacson tells not just that the Alto system
from Xerox inspired him, but also who its star creators were: Lampson,
Thacker and Kay. But then he stomps on them: "Once again, the greatest
innovation would come not from the people who created the breakthroughs,
but from the people who applied them usefully." While he very describes
innovation as a continuum from invention through engineering to marketing,
he seems to be more impressed by the later stages.

Or maybe he just likes to tell stories, and didn't pick up all the
good ones about Ken. Isaacson describes spacewar, arguably the first
stage of computer-game innovation, at great length. At the same time,
all he has to say about early-stage operating systems is a single
sentence that credits John McCarthy with leading a time-sharing effort
at MIT. (In my recollection, McCarthy proseletized; Corbato led.) He
tells how ARPANET, which he says was mainly developed by BB&N, connected
time-shared computers, but breathes not a word about Berkeley's work,
without which ARPANET would have been an open circuit.

"Innovators" won general critical praise. A couple of reviews predicted
it would become the standard of the field. However, an evidently
knowledgeable review in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing faulted
it for peddling familiar potted legends without really digging for
deeper insight. Regarding Thompson and Ritchie, it looks more like
overt suppression.

Doug

Re: [TUHS] Isaacson v Unix

[Ronald Natalie]

Yep, it’s pretty superficial when it comes to looking at where we are today.   
Further, the puppy love over RMS is entirely unjustified.   He was in the right place with a rant about the industry but he’s oft unduly credited by a lot of the early GNU hangers on like Len Tower who made the project a success in spite
of RMS. 

If anybody truly knew RMS they’d not tolerate any of this.   He’s the most odiferous, objectionable, sexist, pedophile I have ever met (though I’ve not met the President yet).

Re: [TUHS] Isaacson v Unix

[Larry McVoy]

+1.  RMS always talked big but the real work was done by other people.
GCC was Tiemann at Sun and then at Cygnus, groff was James Clark,
etc.  I think RMS hacked on emacs but not much else.

On Fri, Jan 04, 2019 at 09:35:53PM -0500, Ronald Natalie wrote:
> Yep, it???s pretty superficial when it comes to looking at where we are today.   
> Further, the puppy love over RMS is entirely unjustified.   He was in the right place with a rant about the industry but he???s oft unduly credited by a lot of the early GNU hangers on like Len Tower who made the project a success in spite
> of RMS. 
> 
> If anybody truly knew RMS they???d not tolerate any of this.   He???s the most odiferous, objectionable, sexist, pedophile I have ever met (though I???ve not met the President yet).

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

Re: [TUHS] Isaacson v Unix

[Chris Hanson]

On Jan 5, 2019, at 7:31 AM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> +1.  RMS always talked big but the real work was done by other people.
> GCC was Tiemann at Sun and then at Cygnus, groff was James Clark,
> etc.  I think RMS hacked on emacs but not much else.

Which I thought was originally derived from Unipress emacs (Gosmacs), and was why old source code used to be hard to find.

  — Chris

Re: [TUHS] Emacs (was: Isaacson v Unix)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Saturday,  5 January 2019 at 17:43:43 -0800, Chris Hanson wrote:
> On Jan 5, 2019, at 7:31 AM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>
>> +1.  RMS always talked big but the real work was done by other people.
>> GCC was Tiemann at Sun and then at Cygnus, groff was James Clark,
>> etc.  I think RMS hacked on emacs but not much else.
>
> Which I thought was originally derived from Unipress emacs
> (Gosmacs), and was why old source code used to be hard to find.

I don't think there's any serious doubt that rms wrote the original
Emacs, in TECO.  If I understand it correctly, though, he took
significant improvements, including screen redisplay, from Gosling
Emacs.

Greg
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Re: [TUHS] Emacs

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> I don't think there's any serious doubt that rms wrote the original
> Emacs, in TECO.

That's an oversimplification.  RMS may have done most of the work, but
he was not the first.  Here's some interesting reading from 1978:

https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/eak/emacs.lore



Chris Hanson wrote:
> (Also, he didn’t write the original emacs. He took it over.)

That's right.

RMS is often credited with the ^R real-time display feature, but that
too originated earlier by Mikkelsen.

>> If I understand it correctly, though, he took significant
>> improvements, including screen redisplay, from Gosling Emacs.
>
> GNU emacs is not a descendant of the TECO package. What I’m referring
> to is that GNU emacs started as a set of hacks on Gosmacs, and the
> Gosmacs code had to be excised because it wasn’t actually something
> FSF could redistribute as their own.

Also correct.  I found a copy of GNU Emacs 13.8 which I believe is the
first version to be distributed.  It has the Gosling display code.

Re: [TUHS] Emacs

[Andrew Luke Nesbit]

On 06/01/2019 07:50, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
> I found a copy of GNU Emacs 13.8 which I believe is the
> first version to be distributed.  It has the Gosling display code.

Wow!  Where did you find this?  Online?

What OS does it run on - ITS?  Is it available for something like Unix?

Andrew
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Re: [TUHS] Emacs

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Andrew Luke Nesbit wrote:
>> I found a copy of GNU Emacs 13.8 which I believe is the first version
>> to be distributed.  It has the Gosling display code.
> Wow!  Where did you find this?  Online?

Yes, on a DECUS tape with VMS software.  I'm not sure it runs on VMS,
though.

This link sometimes works, sometimes doesn't.  But I have it mirrored.

http://decuslib.com/decus/vax85b/gnuemax/emacs/

> What OS does it run on - ITS?  Is it available for something like Unix?

I haven't tried to compile it, but my guess would be 4.2 ish BSD.
Whatever BSD was contemporary around 1985 I suppose.

I did try 16.56 on 4.1BSD, but it wasn't an immediate success.  Some
things seemed to be missing from BSD.

4.3BSD came with a copy of GNU Emacs 17.61.