RE: EMACS, 1976

["Ludwig, Mark" <ludwig.mark@siemens.com>]

> From: Peter Davis
> Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2012 8:28 AM
> To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: EMACS, 1976
> 
> On 7/25/2012 6:36 AM, Barry Margolin wrote:
> > In article <mailman.5547.1343209085.855.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>,
> >   Mark Skilbeck <m@iammark.us> wrote:
> >
> >> Hello, fellow Emacsen (Emacsians?).
> >>
> >> I've been reading RMS's essay, EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable
> >> Display Editor[0], and it's piqued an interest in me; I would like to
> >> view the code that made up the first EMACS release in 1976. Have it
> >> any of you lads and lasses, or know where it I may find?
> >
> > I googled for "teco emacs" and found this:
> >
> > http://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/mit_emacs_170_teco_1220/index.html
> >
> > Good luck understanding TECO.
> >
> 
> I must still have some TECO reference cards around somewhere. I remember
> writing whole applications as TECO macros. Fun.

Yeah, I started hacking EMACS on a DECsystem-2060 (a.k.a. "Twenex") circa 1980.  I did all my EMACS customization work in Lisp, in the equivalent of would now be a .el file, and byte-compiled it to a library file that I subsequently loaded -- just like what we do today.

What I remember having to learn were the TECO display codes.  For example, if I recall correctly (ahem, yes, it really was >30 years ago!), Control-P was the character to "home up" in the minibuffer (which was three lines tall back then), meaning move the cursor to the upper-left-most character position.  Then there was another character to delete the remainder of the space which I don't remember; those two characters appeared frequently in the out-of-the-box EMACS code, because any prompting function had to do that in order for its prompt to appear cleanly and consistently.

Oh, and at the time, I liked to "sign" my e-mail messages with "$$" at the end.  What will not be clear by just looking at a printed representation of TECO is that the dollar sign ("$") is how an ESCape character appears; ESCape-ESCape was the statement terminator, and interactively meant "execute the preceding code."$$