
Bill Joy - "EMACS costs hundreds of dollars?" Did I miss something? - niels_olson
http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~kirkenda/joy84.html
======
abrahamsen
Pretty sure he speaks of Unipress Emacs. A little history:

Richard M. Stallman wrote the original Editor MACroS for the TECO editor.

James A. Gosling implemented Emacs in C as a stand-alone editor, sometimes
called "Gosmacs", and distributed it freely with no copyright notice. Gosmacs
had an extention language called Mocklisp, which wasn't really a Lisp (it had
no lists) but appeared similar.

RMS used Gosmacs to get started on GNU Emacs, which featured a "real" Lisp
(close to Maclisp).

JAG sold the rights to Gosmacs to Unipress, who renamed it Unipress Emacs,
sold it commercially, and stopped distribution of gosmacs and derivatives
(like GNU Emacs).

Presumably it was around this time the interview with Bill Joy occurred.

RMS rewrote the part of GNU Emacs that was derived Gosmacs, mostly the display
code. One could guess that this experience is part of why the GNU project
insists on signed copyright assignment or release forms for key utilities.

~~~
rst
The dates match. The interview is from 1984, which was after the formerly
free-beer Gosmacs had gone commercial ("hundreds of dollars... did I miss
something?" --- yes, Gosling's deal), but before the first public release of
GNU Emacs in 1985, per jwz's timeline here:

<http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html>

------
blakdawg
In the early days, the FSF sold magtapes with GNU software on them - the
charge wasn't for the IP, it was for the material and labor required to copy
the tape(s).

See
[http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/bull/16/gnu_bulletin_28.h...](http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/bull/16/gnu_bulletin_28.html)
for a sample FSF order form from June 1993.

~~~
ts4z
This is from 1984. He's talking about Unipress Emacs.

------
adrianpike
There are some awesome snippets in there that really helps put in perspective
how nice we have it today to build/distribute/use software.

"Page fault, and the computer makes a phone call. Direct broadcast or audio
disk - that's the technology to do that. It's half a gigabyte - and you get
100 kilobyte data rate or a megabyte or something. I don't remember. You can
then carry around with you all the software you need. You can get random data
through some communications link. It is very like Dick Tracy."

~~~
ephermata
Another bit that leapt out for me is his discussion of displays. He's talking
about flatscreen color displays, about 15-20 years before they really become
commonplace.

My favorite is the end, where he talks about how belief and momentum influence
the investment into different technologies. Makes you wonder what technologies
have been "coming soon" for the last decade, but are just waiting for someone
to come in and spend the required amount to pull them off.

------
etcet
"And then the source code got scrunched and I didn't have a complete listing."

"If that scrunch had not happened, vi would have multiple windows, and I might
have put in some programmability - but I don't know."

"I actually used [be] to edit itself and scrunched the source code - sort of
old home day, because we used to do that all the time."

What does Bill mean by the word "scrunch" here? Is this some jargon lost to
the ages?

~~~
JoshTriplett
From context, I'd guess that "scrunched" means trashed/junked/lost/broken. As
in, "And then the source code got trashed and I didn't have a complete
listing."

------
jmcguckin
There was also a commercial version, Unipress EMACS.

~~~
NeilCJames
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs>

------
agumonkey
unipress emacs : 395$ / 1983Q2

<http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html>

------
gojomo
[1984]

