Source and compiling instructions for old version of Emacs (< 19.x)

Source and compiling instructions for old version of Emacs (< 19.x)

[Earl Kent]

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Hi,

I'm working on some research projects on the history of text editor 
technologies and more generally the early days of the free software 
movement.  As part of that research I would like to compile, on a 
contemporary Linux distribution, runnable, early versions of the code, 
say circa `88.  I've looked all over the Internet the only early version 
of emacs I can find is of 18.59, which is already 1992.

Does anyone know of earlier versions and have 
instructions/scripts/patches for compiling it for Linux?  (Even early 
versions of 19.x took a lot of hacking for me to get up and running and 
I still can't 18.59 to run without seg-fault on startup.)

Editorial:  the initial releases of the GNU system, written largely by 
Stallman, stand as one of the great intellectual accomplishments of the 
20th century, not just of hackerdom, but really across all human 
endeavors.  Not having compilable, runnable versions of them, or even 
the source code, makes them in some sense lost works, even as their 
derived works, current Emacs, and inspired works, all modern editors, 
flourish.  On aspect of my research is to set up a project to keep these 
things runnable on latest versions of Linux with as little patching as 
possible.

Thanks for any help ore pointers to others who have worked on this!

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Re: Source and compiling instructions for old version of Emacs (< 19.x)

[Sven Joachim]

On 2009-07-31 22:18 +0200, Earl Kent wrote:

> I'm working on some research projects on the history of text editor
> technologies and more generally the early days of the free software
> movement.  As part of that research I would like to compile, on a
> contemporary Linux distribution, runnable, early versions of the code,
> say circa `88.  I've looked all over the Internet the only early
> version of emacs I can find is of 18.59, which is already 1992.
>
> Does anyone know of earlier versions and have
> instructions/scripts/patches for compiling it for Linux?  (Even early
> versions of 19.x took a lot of hacking for me to get up and running
> and I still can't 18.59 to run without seg-fault on startup.)

The Gentoo project still supports Emacs 18.59, it seems:
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/lisp/emacs/emacs.xml.

Two older versions, 16.56 and 18.41, are available at
http://matt.lee.name/gnu/MIT/gnu/.  Getting these to build will be a
formidable task, I suspect.

Sven

Re: Source and compiling instructions for old version of Emacs (< 19.x)

[Richard Stallman]

    I'm working on some research projects on the history of text editor 
    technologies and more generally the early days of the free software 
    movement.  As part of that research I would like to compile, on a 
    contemporary Linux distribution, 

Linux is a kernel.  Linux alone is not a sufficient platform to run
any version of GNU Emacs.  You probably mean a GNU/Linux distribution,
which consists of the GNU system and Linux together.

Please don't call the GNU system "Linux" -- it is unfair to us
and it is harmful to our work.

See http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html for more explanation
of this, and http://www.gnu.org/gnu/the-gnu-project.html for the
historical background.

Someone, FSF staff I think, found a copy of Emacs 16 for me a few
months ago.  If you promise never to call the whole system "Linux", I
will ask them to dig it up for you.

Re: Source and compiling instructions for old version of Emacs (< 19.x)

[Earl Kent]

> Please don't call the GNU system "Linux" -- it is unfair to us
> and it is harmful to our work.

That was a careless mistake on my part.  Sorry!

> Someone, FSF staff I think, found a copy of Emacs 16 for me a few
> months ago.  If you promise never to call the whole system "Linux", I
> will ask them to dig it up for you.

I promise, and would be much obliged.

Re: Source and compiling instructions for old version of Emacs (< 19.x)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> Date: Fri, 31 Jul 2009 23:21:52 -0400
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> Someone, FSF staff I think, found a copy of Emacs 16 for me a few
> months ago.

How about uploading it to ftp.gnu.org?

Re: Source and compiling instructions for old version of Emacs (< 19.x)

[Stefan Monnier]

>> Someone, FSF staff I think, found a copy of Emacs 16 for me a few
>> months ago.
> How about uploading it to ftp.gnu.org?

Add it to the CVS repository?


        Stefan