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From: tjt@kobold.UUCP (T.J.Teixeira)
Newsgroups: net.emacs
Subject: Re: EMACS Usage
Message-ID: <190@kobold.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 1-Nov-83 10:24:34 EST
Article-I.D.: kobold.190
Posted: Tue Nov  1 10:24:34 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 4-Nov-83 07:17:29 EST
References: <6010@cca.UUCP>
Organization: Masscomp, Littleton, MA
Lines: 38

This is in reference to Steve Zimmerman's comment on editor usage at
CCA, and in particular the comment:
    
    Gosling's EMACS is available on both VAXes, but nobody uses it.

It is very seldom that an editor gets to be the dominant editor on a
system because all the users have tried all the alternatives and made
their choices accordingly.  Rather, most people will use the editor
that is best supported.  If you go to your local guru and ask a
question about vi, and he answers: "I use EMACS, not vi! You'll have to
figure that out yourself.", how long will you continue using vi?

On system which have sizable user communities for different editors,
the editor usage usually closely matches some other division within a
larger organization.  For example, on some of the PDP-10's at MIT, the
CLU people tend to use TED (a screen editor written in CLU) rather than
EMACS.  On one of the VAX's at MIT, most people use Gosling's EMACS,
even though an older version of CCA EMACS is available as well as EE,
another local variant of EMACS.  This is true even though CCA EMACS and
EE are closer to PDP-10 EMACS.  Why?  Partially, for technical reasons,
but mostly for historical -- we got Gosling's EMACS first, and the
system maintainers and older users know it.  That is what is introduced
to new users.  The community of users for EE mainly consists of people
who also use either a PDP-11 or the MIT-NU terminals (a 68000 system).
This reflects the fact that Gosling's EMACS didn't run very well on
these systems (at least when it was first tried), but EE does.  These
people use EE on the VAX because then they can use the same editor on
all their machines.

In all this discussion, I'm reminded of the time that DEC gave a talk
at MIT when the VAX-11/780 was announced.  One of the first questions
was whether TECO would be available.  The response:

	Text editors are like religons --
	only people are more fanatical about text editors!
-- 
	Tom Teixeira,  Massachusetts Computer Corporation.  Littleton MA
	...!{harpo,decvax,ucbcad,tektronix}!masscomp!tjt   (617) 486-9581