Re: Why use CTL-x CTL-c to quit instead of CTL-x CTL-q?

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> GNU Emacs first appeared in 1976 or thereabouts (and not on Unix).
> Stefan corrected me off-list. It wasn't GNU Emacs, but its predecessor
> on ITS.  In fact, Wikipedia indicates that Richard Stallman didn't
> start on GNU Emacs until 1984, in response to the not-open-source
> Gosling Emacs.

Actually, AFAIK (that's before my time) he started GNU Emacs because he
wanted something like Multics Emacs to be available everywhere (and the
use of Lisp as the only implementation language was a hurdle in this
respect).  He didn't want something like Gosling Emacs either (because
that one was using C as the only implementation language since its
extension language was not good enough).  So he took Gosling Emacs's
code as a base (which he mistakenly thought he could use) to make GNU
Emacs (an implementation that combined a "mostly Lisp implementation"
with a "needs only a C compiler" requirement).


        Stefan