🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <cazh7xr0B...@transarc.com> Pat_B...@TRANSARC.COM writes:
>
>Several days ago, I posted a note saying that GNU Emacs was not based
>on James Gosling's Unix Emacs.

Actually, it's an interesting philosophical question, revolving around
how one defines "based".  In a more real sense, GNU Emacs is "based"
on ITS Emacs, which was implemented on the Incompatible Timesharing
System circa 1971, and TWENEX Emacs, a port to Digital's then-new hack
of BBN's TENEX system which would become TOPS-20.  These and a couple
dozen other flavours of Emacs are described in a 1975 technical report
from MIT - I can probably dig up a copy if anyone is interested.

By the way, note that Emacs started out in life running under more
than one operating system, and hiding the details of the differences
of the semantics of their filesystems was an early accomplishment.
Emacs has had long practice at being a "virtual operating system".


;ITS TECO and EMACS should serve as a lesson to all
;of what can be achieved when programmers' creativity is not crushed
;by administrators whose main concern is stifling humor,
;stamping out all possibility of enthusiasm, and forbidding
;everything that isn't compulsory.
;They were produced in a humane anarchy where one man designs,
;implements, and then documents the feature that inspires him.
;They were produced by people who could laugh enough to
;name many years of effort the Incompatible Timesharing System.
;Of course, the whole story is imaginary.  Working conditions
;which do not crush the spirit can't be practical.
;You can't run a team that way if you expect to meet the deadline.
;TECO doesn't really exist;  you were only dreaming it.

;ITS TECO was built by RMS on the work of others
;at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab
;(not to be confused with the Laboratory for Computer Science).
;It was converted to run on Twenex by MMCM at SRI.

;TECO is available to those who like the way it is,
;on a basis of communal co-operation:
;you are welcome to make improvements, but only if you consult
;with the other user sites, and send your changes
;to MIT to be merged in and distributed to everyone.
;You owe your improvements to us in return for what you see here.
;If anyone asks you for a copy, make sure he gets in touch with
;the MIT AI Lab so he can get the latest stuff.


[From TECO.MID, the source for ITS TECO.  RMS = Richard M Stallman and
MMCM = Mike McMahon.]

Lum
--
-- 
Lum Johnson      l...@cis.ohio-state.edu      l...@osu-20.ircc.ohio-state.edu
"You got it kid -- the large print giveth and the small print taketh away."
-------

In article <83...@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> l...@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu (Lum Johnson) writes:
>;TECO is available to those who like the way it is,
>;on a basis of communal co-operation:
>;you are welcome to make improvements, but only if you consult
>;with the other user sites, and send your changes
>;to MIT to be merged in and distributed to everyone.
>;You owe your improvements to us in return for what you see here.

Hmm.  Too bad this policy wasn't visibly in effect when we were hacking
TECO-10 at Caltech.  We didn't have source code.  We ended up disassembling
the thing, inventing our own mnemonic names for labels, and massaging it back
to a form where it could be reassembled even after adding improvements.  This
was the project that gave birth to the Odd Hack Committee.

We did eventually manage to contact the folks from whom we'd gotten this TECO
in the first place (though it took a registered letter to get them to
acknowledge us), and we traded source.  I wonder if they ever merged our
changes into their (commented) source code--I know we never did.

Karl W. Z. Heuer (ka...@kelp.ima.isc.com or ima!kelp!karl), The Walking Lint