Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!cica!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!armadillo.cis.ohio-state.edu!lum
From: lum@armadillo.cis.ohio-state.edu (Lum Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: Origin of term "Emacs"
Keywords: Etymology, Emacs
Message-ID: <57212@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 9 Aug 89 20:00:51 GMT
References: <2481@orion.cf.uci.edu> <57187@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <44052@bbn.COM>
Reply-To: Lum Johnson <lum@cis.ohio-state.edu>
Organization: The Ohio State University, IRCC/CIS Joint Computing Laboratory
Lines: 42

In article <44052@bbn.COM> jr@bbn.com (John Robinson) writes:
>In article <57187@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>, lum@armadillo (Lum Johnson) writes:
>To complete the history, one should mention TV TECO, which was an
>early attempt to make use of all those 24 lines on the tube (remember,
>much of the world was still using teletypes in 1971).  It was as
>though you were always typing raw TECO at the minibuff line, then at
>the completion of a command it would show you 22 lines surrounding
>point.  Point was shown with the two characters /\ .  A little dumb,
>but it worked on a VT05.  I think there were 3 or 4 of these
>half-way-from-TECO-to-EMACS attempts.

I'm certain there were;  I've seen at least four of them myself, and
used at least three of them.  Some were collections of macros such as
QED and TVEDIT, and some were actually free-standing editors such as
VTECO, standardized by Digital as TV for TOPS-20.  There could easily
have been many more.  Emacs itself was one of about half-a-dozen
dispatch-vector-driven editors developed circa 1971-1972, and is known
to the world at large primarily because it absorbed the functionality
of all the others before one of them could successfully absorb it.
Emacs has been much like an amoeba from the very beginning.

Someone recently posted "The Law of Software Development and
Envelopment at MIT" to rec.humor.funny, which states that at MIT
all programs grow and develop until they can read mail.  With the
Babyl library, that actually came rather early in Emacs' case.

>WYSIWYG with self-insertion and automatic redisplay came later with
>EMACS.  I'm not saying it was the first to do this, but in the TECO
>descendents I think it was.

Actually, I think that visual redisplay may have just preceded Emacs,
having been done in VTECO (although it wasn't automatic - you still
needed to type ESC ESC to confirm and execute the command string),
though I'm no longer sure.  The self-insertion of printing characters
was a natural consequence of the dispatch vector support.

Lum
-=-
-- 
Lum Johnson      lum@cis.ohio-state.edu      lum@osu-20.ircc.ohio-state.edu
"You got it kid -- the large print giveth and the small print taketh away."
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