Re: some emacs history

[Thomas Lord <lord@emf.net>]

(An aside: does anyone besides me remember a
lisp-based emacs that was available in 1983 or
so called "CGI Emacs" - that ran on unix workstations?
I am pretty sure that this was not Gosling / Unipress
Emacs and that it used a real lisp, not mock-lisp.
I see no trace of it in web searches but I'm sure
I didn't imagine using it.)


On Thu, 2010-04-29 at 18:39 -0600, Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:
> There is a new paper that has just appeared that documents some early
> history of emacs that may be of interest to some of you.  The DOI in
> the BibTeX entry below leads to a PDF file, but it may require an IEEE
> digital library subscription for yourself or your employer:

Before I knew of Emacs, the first interactive,
visual editor I used was called EDT on a RSTS
system to which I had limited access.

One day I found a PDP-11 assembly language book
in a bookstore, bought that, and tried it out - 
only to find that the RSTS system administrators
would not allow students to use the assembler for
fear that they could compromise "security".  (This
was kind of funny because it was fairly easy to 
subvert some major aspects of security on RSTS,
even without access to the fearsome assembler.  
It was so easy that students found ways to do so
entirely by accident.)

Another day, somebody left a Teco manual in the
terminal room.   Students were allowed to run Teco.

That version of Teco had a scope command (I think
it was "w").  The scope command would update the 
screen of a smart terminal (like VT-52 or VT-100)
with all recent edits.   I think that version used
"< ... >" for loops, not "( ... )".

Do you know anything about the RSTS version of
TECO?

Given the manual, for some strange reason, I wrote
an EDT emulator in TECO, adding a feature that 
let users enter a string of TECO commands and 
bind them to a key on the numeric keypad. I was
very excited to have "invented" an editor for which
users could write new commands.  (GNU Emacs was 
first released 1-2 years later and I first learned
*an* emacs (a proprietary emacs, not Gosling's) 
maybe 6-9 months after my TECO hack).

My hack looked enough like the real EDT that I quietly
installed it in the public user account that all
students shared.  So, whenever someone ran "edt" - 
they would get this TECO version.   It took a couple
of days before anyone noticed (and I didn't get in
all that much trouble - just told not to do that again).

TECO was a blast.   Deep in a box, somewhere, I 
still have a listing of the line noise that was my
EDT emulator.   The scope command was magic, as far
I was concerned back then.   I could see how people
could do a full-screen editor on one of those new-fangled
micro-computers with their memory-mapped character
displays but the hair of sending all those VT-XX(X) 
escape sequences was pretty amazing.

-t