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EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Display Editor (1981)

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Re: EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Display Editor (1981)

#31

Post by hga »

pekk wrote: post #27
lispm wrote: post #21

Stallman did not mention Guy L Steele jr. and Dave Moon. Not so nice... http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html Dan Weinreb described it this way: '(TECO-based) Emacs was created and designed by Guy L. Steele Jr. and David Moon. After they had it working, and it had become established as the standard text editor at the AI lab, Stallman took over its maintenance.'

All these years later and XEmacs is still trying to steamroll RMS. Can you just stop?

I heard this history from an eyewitness in, oh, about 1981 plus or minus a year, long before RMS forked Gosling Emacs for his GNU Emacs.

None of the three other listed AI Lab names ever had anything to do with these C/UNIX(TM) versions of EMACS.

Re: EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Display Editor (1981)

#32

Post by kps »

mjn wrote: post #25
lispm wrote: post #21

Stallman did not mention Guy L Steele jr. and Dave Moon. Not so nice... http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html Dan Weinreb described it this way: '(TECO-based) Emacs was created and designed by Guy L. Steele Jr. and David Moon. After they had it working, and it had become established as the standard text editor at the AI lab, Stallman took over its maintenance.'

Hmm, this other 1979-era history of Emacs also doesn't mention Steele, though it does mention Weinreb and Moon, whom the author seems to have worked with closely: http://www.multicians.org/mepap.html .

That's a wonderfully interesting article.

Steele was one of the authors of the TMACS package, for which this article has “???” in the references.

Incidentally, the article mentions Multics' version of QED in passing; this regular-expression-based editor was written by Ken Thompson¹ and is a (more complicated) ancestor of ed(1), the standard text editor on Unix.

¹ http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/qed.html

Re: EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Display Editor (1981)

#33

Post by emmelaich »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #11

The original IDE, and originally outlawed for 'regular' users because it dragged the the DEC KL10 to its knees in I/O traffic if more than 20 or 30 terminals ran it at the same time. It is an interesting environment but for what ever reason I ended up back in VIM (at school it was Emacs or FINE, at home 'MicroEMACS' and at Sun it was 'vi') Now vim is my go to editor but I'm not as fast as some folks who have melded w…

Heh, you were lucky. When I were a lad, vi was reserved for the Honours students and post-grads.

Us undergrads had to use `ed`.

Re: EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Display Editor (1981)

#36

Post by JadeNB »

omaranto wrote: post #24
Sharlin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you could. You just used pencil and paper.

I don't understand: surely with pencil and paper you are able to see the code you are editing?

> I don't understand: surely with pencil and paper you are able to see the code you are editing?

Indeed, that is the meaning of the exchange. brandonhsiao said (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8122592):

> You used to... not be able to see your code verbatim as you were editing it?

and Sharlin, affecting to disagree, said (https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=8122773):

> Sure you could [meaning, you could see your code verbatim]. You just used pencil and paper.

Re: EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Display Editor (1981)

#37

Post by JadeNB »

shortsightedsid wrote: post #20
bellerocky wrote: post #18

I just had this thought, what if Linus came in or HMS or someone else kinda already famous did a "Show HN: I made a extensible editor called emacs" or "Show HN: I made a posix compatible kernel" Would lead to some interesting discussions I think if they were active in the comments.

Pretty sure that Andrew Tanenbaum would comment about Microkernels being superior and how monolithic kernels are doomed to fail and belong in the past!

Eponysterical (http://metachat.org/index.php/2005/11/16/did_we_ever_decide#...)?

Re: EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Display Editor (1981)

#38

Post by seanmcdirmid »

_xhok wrote: post #7

Am I reading this right? You used to... not be able to see your code verbatim as you were editing it? My god, that sounds horrible.

Someday, I hope someone will say "Am I reading this right? You used to not be able to see your code execute as you were editing it? My god, that sounds horrible."

There is a lot of technology advancement (in software and hardware) that we just take for granted today, and will tomorrow!

Re: EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Display Editor (1981)

#39

Post by omaranto »

JadeNB wrote: post #36
omaranto wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand: surely with pencil and paper you are able to see the code you are editing?

> I don't understand: surely with pencil and paper you are able to see the code you are editing? Indeed, that is the meaning of the exchange. brandonhsiao said ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8122592 ): > You used to... not be able to see your code verbatim as you were editing it? and Sharlin, affecting to disagree, said ( https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=8122773 ): > Sure you could [meaning, you could se…

Thanks, got mixed up somehow and inserted a negative were there was none.

Re: EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Display Editor (1981)

#40

Post by a_e_k »

kabdib wrote: post #29
dasil003 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever used a 300bps modem to connect to the internet? If you did then you would see how avoiding rendering could make you much much more productive.

I had Emacs running "okay-ish" on my 300 baud modem. I wrote a terminal emulator that implemented character and line insert and delete, and region scroll, which made Emacs screen refresh (borderline) tolerable. Let's just say that it WAS tolerable considering that my alternative was to use punchcards. (Imagine long lines for punchcard machines in the basement of the CS building, which smelled of too many students and…

If memory serves, one of Emacs innovations was to decouple the display system from the editing system. The display would run asynchronously. If the display lagged due to a slow connection it would always be trying to show the most current state rather than strictly rendering the results of each edit operation, one by one. It also tried to minimize the terminal codes need to bring the display up to date.

I can't say I've ever used it on a 300 baud modem, but I have used it over a transcontinental SSH session on a crowded wifi connection and I've been thankful for it being designed to operate well under adverse conditions like that.

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