
An Introduction to the EMACS Editor (1978) - lispm
https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/5748/AIM-447.pdf?sequence=2
======
gnat
"Finally, of all the people who have contributed to the development of EMACS,
and the TECO behind it, special mention and appreciation go to Richard M.
Stallman. Henot only gave TECO the power and generality it has, but brought
together the good ideas of many different Teco-function packages, added a
tremendous amount of new ideas and environment, and created EMACS. Personally,
one of the joys of my avocational life has been writing Teco/EMACS functions;
what makes this fun and not painful is the rich set of tools to work with, all
but a few of which have an "RMS" chiseled somewhere on them."

~~~
gnulinux
I think RMS is an old school, a true hacker. Most things happening in tech
industry today, if you go deep down, there is an RMS chiseled somewhere on
something. I wish we could have him in HN, he's a very interesting person.

~~~
oblio
There must be some HN email client somewhere :)

~~~
rbanffy
[https://melpa.org/#/hackernews](https://melpa.org/#/hackernews)

------
gumby
If you missed it, the tiny section on ITS has some gems:

When you connected to one of the ITs machines (even over the net) and wanted
to log in, ECC suggests checking to see if anyone is logged in with the name
you wanted and if not, login in with that name. Not _create an account_.
“Logging in” in those days mainly set your home directory. No accounts, no
passwords

The command interpreter (shell in modern parlance) was the debugger, DDT. If
any program crashed you could debug in in situ rather (with all connections
open, files open etc) rather than sifting through a core dump. It’s ass if
/bin/sh was gdb.

Those were great days in a more civilised age. You can see here where the
mutability of the Lisp Machines came from.

~~~
jpmattia
> If you missed it, the tiny section on ITS has some gems:

I was there a few years later in the early 80s, and I wouldn't romanticize
ITS. There were reasons it didn't live on.

However, one of the more hilarious inventions in the system: It used to be a
pastime to try and crash a system. This was of course a huge PITA for anyone
else on the system, but for whatever reason of target fixation, you couldn't
stop people from trying.

So ITS had an explicit command to crash the system (KILL SYSTEM iirc), and it
was well published. By removing the challenge, the system stayed up. There's
some deep statement about hacker psychology in there somewhere.

Edit: Just saw your username. You weren't by any chance the same gumby from
the 80s?

~~~
mixmastamyk
> Just saw your username. You weren't by any chance the same gumby from the
> 80s?

Eddie Murphy on SNL? ;-)

~~~
gumby
Yes, I am the same gumby at the MIT AI lab from late 70s to mid 80s. Never saw
the SNL thing though have heard about it.

~~~
jpmattia
> _Yes, I am the same gumby at the MIT AI lab from late 70s to mid 80s._

Apparently you have a pretty memorable username, because I don't think we ever
interacted. I was a mere UROP. (I worked on a robot named TARDIS (tea and
ravioli delivery service) for Jon Taft (tfat) and John [can't remember his
last name], ultimately under tk. Nobody would remember me, being just a peon
and then leaving to do hardware, but it was a great environment to cut your
teeth, and a real privilege to have delved into LMs at that time.)

Hope things went well for you and the rest of that bunch, it was an incredible
place.

------
xte
Sometimes new IT users do not comprehend why many things exists to navigate
through text since they are born in mouse/X graphics era.

Many of that trick does not have a purpose anymore but many still have, and
not only for terminal usage but also for speed and comfort.

The bad part IMO is the dichotomy between "younger" and "older" users, the
former would benefit a lot from many "semi-forgotten techs" but the letter
need to modernize and explain things a bit or at least advertise with proper
demos.

In Emacs world many things happen in this direction with newly precooked
configs, new packages etc, same happen in shell land with zsh/fish and the
recent "epidemic" new tool set that mostly add sugar to classic unix
utilities, that's good but we need more and more.

I dream a GuixSD with Emacs as a login shell on terminal and as default
desktop with EXWM and a good looking default theme, a small org-based intro
vitutor style at first startup, perhaps with few video demo and many, many
more users may be enlightened :-)

~~~
rauhl
> Sometimes new IT users do not comprehend why many things exists to navigate
> through text since they are born in mouse/X graphics era.

You’re right, but the way I like to put it is: I often use text rather than
moving a mouse & clicking for the same reason that human beings often use
speech rather than pointing & grunting (indeed, using a mouse is a lot like
pointing & grunting at one’s computer).

Using a smartphone & tablet really drive home how powerful it is to have a
full-featured input device (i.e., a real keyboard), rather than just a mouse-
driven UI.

~~~
xte
Oh, I will steal (and credit of course) your "pointing & grunting" comparison
:D thanks!

On power I often leave some new colleagues astonished when they see how quick
I am with Emacs vs with their "modern" solutions :-)

~~~
EdwardCoffin
Point-and-grunt as a derogatory term for GUIs has been around for decades [1]

[1] [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/point-and-drool-
interface....](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/point-and-drool-
interface.html)

~~~
rbanffy
"Real men don't use mice" was a common saying at that time.

~~~
xte
Not everywhere since Plan9 is really mouse-centric :-)

However I think anyone have used both keyboard centric environment, at any
level, and "modern mouse usage" can say that mouse sometimes is needed (like
for image editing) but for plain UI is far less needed and often not really
comfortable nor efficient at all...

My only consideration is that our knowledge is mostly text, we have added
video/images in the game but still text is by far predominant and mostly
without any viable other option... So having a text-centric environment,
without, of course, dropping graphics&c capabilities it's the most logic way
of work...

------
sudovancity
Shoutout to my first CS teacher who pushed EMACS on my fellow students and me.
It was a pain but I'm happy about it.

------
taeric
Funny to see that an introduction to my favorite editor... from the year I was
born.

I know it is a very different beast than what I use today. Still amazing to
see that some core ideas have managed to keep it ticking all of these years.

~~~
Investogician
Funny to see that an introduction to my favorite editor... from the year I was
-20 years old. :P

------
nickcw
It is fun comparing the key sequences to a modern emacs.

I looked through the section for "Basic Buffer Editing Info" and every one of
the key commands mentioned there would work in a modern emacs!

You can now use fancy cursor keys rather than CTRL-P, CTRL-N but if an emacs
user from 1978 was stuck in front of an emacs today then they could get
straight to work :-)

The meta keys look a bit different though. You type two alt-modes (whatever
they are) to get into the mini-buffer and then enter "MM-commands". In modern
emacs you type Meta-x (Alt-x on most keyboards) to get into the same mode.

~~~
gnulinux
This is one of the reasons I prefer using old, established, principled FLOSS
software as opposed to Enterprise software. I don't have to change my habits
because a middle manager decided to change the product to get a promotion.

------
xrd
There is a room mentioned in the document (p23): "NE43-829". Is this at MIT?

It says a manual for Macsyma exists there.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma)

"...one of the oldest general-purpose computer algebra systems which is still
widely used. It was originally developed from 1968 to 1982 at MIT's Project
MAC."

Is this a real room at MIT? Can someone at MIT check to see if the manual is
still there? I'd like to borrow it.

~~~
gumby
That was a room on the 8th floor of tech square (almost the entire 9th floor,
the top of that building, was machine room).

Tech square was an office complex built in anticipation of the space program.
Then JFK was assassinated and LBJ moved mission control and all that stuff to
Texas. NE43 was the name of 545 Main st. MIT had a bunch of floors, first 8&9,
then 3 (CIA had the other half for a long time), then 7. I think Honeywell had
an office there too, perhaps in one of the other buildings, because of the
Multics project.

------
Isamu
Memories of using TECO EMACS on the TOPS-20 systems at CMU. Anybody else here?

------
ggm
Dec teco manual in my shelf.

~~~
agumonkey
like this one or larger ?
[http://www.bitsavers.org/www.computer.museum.uq.edu.au/pdf/D...](http://www.bitsavers.org/www.computer.museum.uq.edu.au/pdf/DEC-10-UTECA-
A-D%20decsystem10%20Introduction%20To%20TECO%20\(Text%20Editor%20And%20Corrector\).pdf)

~~~
ggm
Looks like it's that one. I used the BSD teco port with it to re familiarize
myself with the thing. Last used it on tops10 in the 1979 timeframe

~~~
agumonkey
Cool. I never thought of TECO as a product with a manual ..

~~~
ggm
As a George, my name did some g(lobal) operation. It was an editor more talked
about than used. SOS linemode edit on tops 10 was just simpler on a decwriter
or vt52. I do recall teco being quite like ed: you really have to be
comfortable with an amount of text carried in your head. So..it's an editor
for people with a coherent mental model. I was more incoherent.

~~~
agumonkey
Oh I love that side of ed. It helps my mind stay focused somehow.

~~~
ggm
Charles Forsthy at York had a macro or code hack to do .-12,.+12p-12p so you
got a screen repaint about the current line.

Tecos current mark thing was pretty good actually.

~~~
agumonkey
hehe that was the first thing that I wanted to do, post command `,` (made me
realize how vi is really visual mode for ed)

I love these old restricted programs.

------
pulsarpietro
Fantastic, I wish I were born those times.

~~~
ggm
The impact of the gnu manifesto was pretty big. We talked about it, wondered
when he'd get a compiler better than the PCC. I think we (leeds uni, 1980s)
said years off but actually gcc 0.9? Came out far faster than I expected.

Roll forward 10-15 years. Former compiler writers out of work. Gcc and llvm
killed the market. On the other hand we have really good competing duopoly of
compilers and lots of upper language support and diverse languages. So.. win
some lose some. And it's not like rust and go and Java have to use llvm and
gcc. Rust does. Go doesn't always.

~~~
Tor3
Commercial compilers are still produced - IBM with its XL C compiler, for
example, and Intel's icc. Both are good. Intel's icc often produces slightly
faster code than GCC. And a little back in time, SGI's MIPSPro compilers were
extremely good. I'm sure there are a couple more contemporary compilers out
there but the IBM and Intel compilers are something we use at work, at least.

~~~
frutiger
> Commercial compilers are still produced - IBM with its XL C compiler, for
> example, and Intel's icc. Both are good.

We have a few AIX machines and I’ve never heard anyone refer to xlC as a good
compiler. It’s an aging compiler with idiosyncratic linker flags/behaviour and
no support for modern standards.

~~~
Tor3
I have no idea what you mean by 'no support for modern standards'. It's a
modern compiler for modern C (and the newest versions are compatible with code
written for modern gcc, with a flag). The only thing about it is it has its
own syntax for flags, which aren't exactly difficult, and they're well
documented.

It produces better code than gcc in many cases. Which is exactly what you
would expect for a compiler written specifically for IBM by IBM. Lots of fine-
tuning options for the Power architectures.

You say you have a few AIX machines - which one, and which OS version, and
which compiler versions? I'm on Power7 and Power8, with AIX 7.1 Don't look at
AIX 4/5.

------
throwaway487550
Nowadays it cannot even be fully comprehend how places like MIT, Stanford AI
lab, Xerox Park research and, of course, Bell labs were islands of
intelligence and sanity compared to the modern day's ocean of screaming
bullshit.

''Dark liquid with negative mass'' sort of papers is what it all came to.

~~~
PurpleRamen
MIT, Stanford AI lab, Xerox Park research and Bell labs had 1978 their share
of bullshit too. But today they are normally forgotten because survivorship
bias let's us only remember the successful stuff, which BTW would include the
bullshit if it were so successfully bad that it became memorable.

~~~
throwaway487550
No. They never produced anything even vaguely similar to J2EE, NodeJS or PHP.

Old School things, like ML, MIT Scheme, T3 Scheme, Common Lisps and Haskell
are unattainable to modern narcissistic idiots.

~~~
kkarakk
is it born in the wrong generation or can't stand what the new generation is
doing

