
EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Display Editor (1981) - arthurnn
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html
======
tephra
I actually found an earlier version of this paper in my teachers room
(published 1979). It's AI Memo 519 (the linked paper is 591A) and I can't find
a reference to this anywhere. I even emailed Stallman and he couldn't remember
when it was first published (he thought that it was published in 1981 first
to).

I uploaded it to archive.org:
[https://archive.org/details/MITAIMemo519](https://archive.org/details/MITAIMemo519)
My teacher suspects he got it from a guy that used to work at MIT at the time
(can't remember the name). I have not been able to find it anywhere else, even
the AI memo archive doesn't have it
([http://publications.csail.mit.edu/ai/browse/0500browse.shtml](http://publications.csail.mit.edu/ai/browse/0500browse.shtml)).
Anyone able to shed some light?

~~~
elwell
Surprised you got a reply via email. I thought he prefers snail mail.

~~~
zimbatm
Richard Stallman uses Emacs to read and send email:
[http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com/](http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com/)

It's possible you're mixing up with Donald Knuth: [http://www-cs-
faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html](http://www-cs-
faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html)

------
kourt
This is nice to see a relatively brief introduction to the essential features.

Steve Yegge wrote: "Go look over Paul Nordstrom's shoulder while he works
sometime, if you don't believe me. It's a real eye-opener for someone who's
used Visual Blub .NET-like IDEs their whole career."

Does anyone know of any public video of Mr. Nordstrom using emacs, or can
someone who knows him request one? [edit: properly attribute the quote]

~~~
abp
Well, Emacs Rocks: [http://emacsrocks.com/](http://emacsrocks.com/)

~~~
DonHopkins
Not only that, but also: Emacs Loves You.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo)

------
rpdillon
I found this amusing, towards the end:

    
    
      Bravo comes from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Its orientation 
      is toward text formatting, and it can display multiple fonts, underlining, 
      etc. It makes heavy use of a graphical pointing device, the `mouse' 
      (see Augment). It is not programmable and offers no special help for 
      editing programs as opposed to text. For more information, see your
      local industrial espionage agent.

~~~
earljwagner
Some trivia: Bravo, the first WYSIWYG word processor, was developed by Butler
Lampson and Charles Simonyi at PARC. Simonyi left PARC in 1981 to join
Microsoft and led the Word and Excel projects.

------
ChuckMcM
The original IDE, and originally outlawed for 'regular' users because it
dragged the the DEC KL10 to its knees in I/O traffic if more than 20 or 30
terminals ran it at the same time.

It is an interesting environment but for what ever reason I ended up back in
VIM (at school it was Emacs or FINE, at home 'MicroEMACS' and at Sun it was
'vi') Now vim is my go to editor but I'm not as fast as some folks who have
melded well with either EMACS or VIM.

~~~
emmelaich
Heh, you were lucky. When I were a lad, vi was reserved for the Honours
students and post-grads.

Us undergrads had to use `ed`.

~~~
gruntled
Ed! You was lucky to 'ave ed! In my day all we 'ad was a magnetized needle and
a very steady hand!

------
conistonwater
I want to point out this quote:

"The traditional attitude towards Lisp holds that it is useful only for
esoteric amusements and Artificial Intelligence. The appearance of Multics
EMACS as a Honeywell product is the death knell of this view."

I agree!

------
lispm
Stallman did not mention Guy L Steele jr. and Dave Moon.

Not so nice...

[http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html](http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-
timeline.html)

Dan Weinreb described it this way:

'(TECO-based) Emacs was created and designed by Guy L. Steele Jr. and David
Moon. After they had it working, and it had become established as the standard
text editor at the AI lab, Stallman took over its maintenance.'

~~~
mjn
Hmm, this other 1979-era history of Emacs also doesn't mention Steele, though
it does mention Weinreb and Moon, whom the author seems to have worked with
closely:
[http://www.multicians.org/mepap.html](http://www.multicians.org/mepap.html).

~~~
Curmudgel
[http://web.archive.org/web/20120217011347/http://danweinreb....](http://web.archive.org/web/20120217011347/http://danweinreb.org/blog/rebuttal-
to-stallmans-story-about-the-formation-of-symbolics-and-lmi)

------
brandonhsiao
Am I reading this right? You used to... not be able to see your code verbatim
as you were editing it? My god, that sounds horrible.

~~~
dasil003
Have you ever used a 300bps modem to connect to the internet? If you did then
you would see how avoiding rendering could make you much much more productive.

~~~
kabdib
I had Emacs running "okay-ish" on my 300 baud modem. I wrote a terminal
emulator that implemented character and line insert and delete, and region
scroll, which made Emacs screen refresh (borderline) tolerable.

Let's just say that it WAS tolerable considering that my alternative was to
use punchcards. (Imagine long lines for punchcard machines in the basement of
the CS building, which smelled of too many students and way too much fear, and
waiting six hours for your program to run. Oh, and everything in uppercase...)

~~~
a_e_k
If memory serves, one of Emacs innovations was to decouple the display system
from the editing system. The display would run asynchronously. If the display
lagged due to a slow connection it would always be trying to show the most
current state rather than strictly rendering the results of each edit
operation, one by one. It also tried to minimize the terminal codes need to
bring the display up to date.

I can't say I've ever used it on a 300 baud modem, but I have used it over a
transcontinental SSH session on a crowded wifi connection and I've been
thankful for it being designed to operate well under adverse conditions like
that.

~~~
ams6110
Yes, I always assumed that was part of the motivation for "chunky" operations
like forward/delete word, paragraph, etc. On a slow connection it made a big
difference to be able to jump ahead by words, paragraphs, or "balanced
expressions" rather than character-by-character. And VT100 terminals didn't
have a mouse so there was no way to do something like click-drag to select a
block of text.

------
bellerocky
I just had this thought, what if Linus came in or HMS or someone else kinda
already famous did a "Show HN: I made a extensible editor called emacs" or
"Show HN: I made a posix compatible kernel" Would lead to some interesting
discussions I think if they were active in the comments.

~~~
shortsightedsid
Pretty sure that Andrew Tanenbaum would comment about Microkernels being
superior and how monolithic kernels are doomed to fail and belong in the past!

~~~
JadeNB
Eponysterical
([http://metachat.org/index.php/2005/11/16/did_we_ever_decide#...](http://metachat.org/index.php/2005/11/16/did_we_ever_decide#c58136))?

------
lelf
GNU Emacs Manual, 1st ed. — [http://bitsavers.trailing-
edge.com/pdf/fsf/GNU_Emacs_Version...](http://bitsavers.trailing-
edge.com/pdf/fsf/GNU_Emacs_Version16_Jun85.pdf)

Edit: you can buy the modern version from FSF:
[http://shop.fsf.org/product/Emacs_Manual_24/](http://shop.fsf.org/product/Emacs_Manual_24/)

------
hibbelig
What's fascinating is that under "Research Through Development of Installed
Tools", the author describes agile software development, some twenty years
before it got that name.

------
cheez
Here is to another 30 years of Emacs.

------
waynecochran
I'll just leave this here: [http://xkcd.com/378/](http://xkcd.com/378/)

------
ams6110
_What we decide is not worth while to add, the user can provide for himself.
He can just as easily provide his own alternative to a feature if he does not
like the way it works in the standard system._

Written before the PC police insisted upon alternating He/She pronouns,
awkward constructions such as "He or she", or flatly incorrect usage, i.e.
"their" as a singular.

~~~
Permit
Has your quality of life really suffered so much now that you're encouraged to
write to a broader audience?

