Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!cica!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!ginosko!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!thad From: thad@cup.portal.com (Thad P Floryan) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: PD or Shareware Copyrights Message-ID: <20131@cup.portal.com> Date: 5 Jul 89 00:26:23 GMT References: <18195@louie.udel.EDU> <18280@louie.udel.EDU> <18366@louie.udel.EDU> <14731@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <404@xdos.UUCP> Organization: The Portal System (TM) Lines: 64 Re: all the banter about EMACS' genesis ... I still have the ITS-style EMACS running on two of my DEC-20 systems and, like most of the good software of the era of the 60's and 70's, is "PD" in the sense its development was funded by public monies (i.e. our taxes). In any event, the earliest version I still have online has this title page in its docs: " MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LABORATORY AI Memo 555 5 September 1980 EMACS MANUAL FOR TWENEX USERS by Richard M. Stallman A reference manual for the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor This manual corresponds to EMACS version 150 This report describes work done at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Support for the laboratory's research is provided in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense under Office of Naval Research contract N00014-75-C-0643. " I say "PD software" in this context in the same way the 1964 "Project GENIE" software (at UCB, on SDS 930), also ARPA/DoD funded, was freely available and was used, in fact, to start both Tymshare, Inc. and Comshare, Inc. Whenever we (Tymshare) needed a software update, I just drove up to UCB, walked into the computer room, mounted my tape, dumped the whole system, and drove back to Palo Alto with all the goodies! :-) "TWENEX" is a word-pun, meaning the DEC-20 superset of Tenex (from BBN) which was the virtual-memory demand paged version of the PDP-10. The first LISP-based Emacs variant appeared on the Multics system (as I recall). "Somewhere" online I have a paper describing how the MIT-TECO macro extensions created by many people over an 8-10 year period were collected by RMS to create the first cohesive body of Editing Macros ==> EMACS circa 1977-1978. I still daily use the DEC-20 version (actually, up to version 16x something now) along with the latest (18.54) GNU Emacs. The GNU EMACS is, of course, a far greater and better superset (of the DEC-20 version), but the two have the same "look and feel." Both are distributed with full source; I received my first copy of TWENEX EMACS directly from Richard Stallman (he literally handed me the tape), and the GNU versions I uucp from osu-cis. Other "mainframe" versions of EMACS include those from Gosling and Unipress; I've tried those on my VAX, but switched back to GNU EMACS which, for my purposes, is more featureful and reliable. The #^$%^& stack dumps from the Unipress version, after using ^C in a spawned sub-process, render it totally unusable in my opinion. The GNU EMACS works fine on my 3B1 (UNIXPC) systems which means it should work fine on the AMIGA-UNIX too. Thad Floryan [ thad@cup.portal.com (OR) ..!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!thad ]