some emacs history

some emacs history

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

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:

@String{j-IEEE-ANN-HIST-COMPUT  = "IEEE Annals of the History of Computing"}

@Article{Murphy:2009:BT,
  author =       "Dan Murphy",
  title =        "The Beginnings of {TECO}",
  journal =      j-IEEE-ANN-HIST-COMPUT,
  volume =       "31",
  number =       "4",
  pages =        "110--115",
  month =        oct # "\slash " # dec,
  year =         "2009",
  CODEN =        "IAHCEX",
  DOI =          "http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MAHC.2009.127",
  ISSN =         "1058-6180",
  bibdate =      "Wed Apr 28 18:56:30 2010",
  acknowledgement = ack-nhfb,
}

I've been using emacs long enough that I date back to TECO days, and
probably wrote almost as much TECO code as almost anyone, except for
rms himself.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe@math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe@acm.org  beebe@computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: some emacs history

[Stefan Monnier]

>>>>> "Nelson" == Nelson H F Beebe <beebe@math.utah.edu> writes:

> 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:

http://tenex.opost.com/anhc-31-4-anec.pdf

Seems to work without you having to pay to get access to what has
already been paid by taxpayers.


        Stefan

Re: some emacs history

[Lennart Borgman]

On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 3:01 PM, Stefan Monnier
<monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>>>>>> "Nelson" == Nelson H F Beebe <beebe@math.utah.edu> writes:
>
>> 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:
>
> http://tenex.opost.com/anhc-31-4-anec.pdf
>
> Seems to work without you having to pay to get access to what has
> already been paid by taxpayers.


This is a big problem with doi. It may point to hidden resources and
in fact be totally useless for those who does not have access.

Does Open Access provide something similar? I think that should be
done and promoted in place of doi (or doi should change).

Re: some emacs history

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> writes:

>> This is a big problem with doi. It may point to hidden resources and
>> in fact be totally useless for those who does not have access.

I don't view that as a problem peculiar to DOIs; it also applies to
URLs, as well as non-electronic services, such as private clubs.
Somethings in life are free, but most are not.

By giving the article title in my posting, I hoped that list readers
without access might see whether a preprint can be found for free
elsewhere on the Web.  That is frequently the case with academic
research, although I suspect that Dan Murphy has retired by now.

However, I should have mentioned in my posting that many city, county,
regional, and academic libraries can get copies of journal articles
via the international Interlibrary Loan facility, often at no cost to
the borrow.  [I once got a physical book from a library in Scotland
that way.]

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe@math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe@acm.org  beebe@computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: some emacs history

[Lennart Borgman]

On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 7:57 PM, Nelson H. F. Beebe <beebe@math.utah.edu> wrote:
> Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> writes:
>
>>> This is a big problem with doi. It may point to hidden resources and
>>> in fact be totally useless for those who does not have access.
>
> I don't view that as a problem peculiar to DOIs; it also applies to
> URLs, as well as non-electronic services, such as private clubs.
> Somethings in life are free, but most are not.


It would not be a problem of DOIs if they were used to point to
scientific reports.(I am very doubtful if anything that is not
available for free should be used as references in scientific works,
even more since abstracts can be very misleading. But I guess this is
not the best place to discuss this ;-)

Re: some emacs history

[Lennart Borgman]

Should of course be "It would not be a problem of DOIs if they wer
*NOT* used to point to scientific reports".


On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 8:02 PM, Lennart Borgman
<lennart.borgman@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 7:57 PM, Nelson H. F. Beebe <beebe@math.utah.edu> wrote:
>> Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>>> This is a big problem with doi. It may point to hidden resources and
>>>> in fact be totally useless for those who does not have access.
>>
>> I don't view that as a problem peculiar to DOIs; it also applies to
>> URLs, as well as non-electronic services, such as private clubs.
>> Somethings in life are free, but most are not.
>
>
> It would not be a problem of DOIs if they were used to point to
> scientific reports.(I am very doubtful if anything that is not
> available for free should be used as references in scientific works,
> even more since abstracts can be very misleading. But I guess this is
> not the best place to discuss this ;-)
>

Re: some emacs history

[Thomas Lord]

(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

Re: some emacs history

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Thomas Lord <lord@emf.net> raises a memory "CGI Emacs" about 1983 or
so.

I think you mean CCA Emacs (Computer Corporation of America, perhaps?).

It was the first Emacs available on VAX VMS, and was a commercial
product. We had it here at Utah for a couple of years, I think, until
GNU Emacs became available (but memory is hazy after 20+ years).

There are lists of historical emacs programs at

	http://www.finseth.com/emacs.html

The author of that site wrote the 1991 book "The Craft of Text Editing
--- Emacs for the Modern World".  That book, and many others, are
recorded at

	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/index-table-g.html#gnu

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe@math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe@acm.org  beebe@computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------