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From: macrakis@harvard.ARPA (Stavros Macrakis)
Newsgroups: net.emacs
Subject: Re: EMACS -- What does it mean?
Message-ID: <356@harvard.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 13-Sep-85 18:29:27 EDT
Article-I.D.: harvard.356
Posted: Fri Sep 13 18:29:27 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 14-Sep-85 16:56:42 EDT
References: <5268@mit-eddie.UUCP> <2615@ihnss.UUCP>
Organization: Aiken Comp. Lab., Harvard
Lines: 57

> Someone at a luncheon suggested it meant:  ...
> 	-- Warren Montgomery

Actually, if anyone cares....  The original Emacs was written as a
package of Editing MACroS under the Teco text editor on the DEC
PDP-10 machine running the ITS timesharing system at the MIT AI lab
about nine years ago.  ITS Teco is distantly related to other Tecos on
PDP-10's in that its basic commands are all the same (Example: to
go to the end of the current line and insert `foo', the command is
`:LIfoo$'), but has a very large repertory of sometimes useful,
sometimes weird, and always cryptic commands.  (Example: Sort the
lines of the buffer using as key everything between `>>' and '<<'
would be ^P S>>$ $ S<<$ $ L $').

Since before 1971, Teco ran on display terminals in a mode where
commands were echoed at the bottom of the screen (hence the term `echo
line') and the buffer was displayed in the rest of the screen.  (In
case you're wondering how dot was indicated--since the cursor was
always in the echo area--it was `/\'.)  Still, commands were not
executed as they were typed in, but rather when they were terminated
with $$.

In addition, there were two different real-time edit modes, called ^T
and ^R mode (because those were the Teco commands to enter the modes).
These modes were wired into Teco (which was written in assembler), and
not very heavily used.

Around 1970, several people decided that real-time editing in Teco
would be a good idea.  I'm not sure when ^R mode was made extensible,
but it must have been about this time.  Several packages were put
together.  One of them was especially designed for light users or
non-hacker users.  Its commands were fairly mnemonic and emphasized
word processing.  Another one, named Tecmac, was designed for and by
hackers.  A third, which came a bit later, was Emacs.

Emacs had the advantage that its designer and developer, Richard
Stallman, also maintained Teco, to which he made many extensions to
make Emacs easier to write and maintain and more efficient to run.
The other macro packages had had to use bare Teco, which is something
like trying to write systems programs in old Dartmouth Basic.  To give
you an idea of how primitive Teco was before Stallman's enhancements,
it didn't even have named variables and procedures (just q-registers A
- Z).  All the macro packages were user-customizable, but
customization required a knowledge of many obscure parts of Teco.

The first Emacs that was written in a `friendlier' environment was, I
believe, Multics Emacs, written by Bernie Greenberg.  It was written
in Multics Maclisp.

Since then, of course, there have been many Emacs's, most of them
emphasizing the notion of extensibility and power.

But ITS Emacs runs on ...!

	-s

(Stavros Macrakis)