Yes that is 519A which is not the same as the one I found called just 519. 519A was published 1981, 519 seemingly in 1979.
There are a few papers circa 1980 that cite an AI Lab memo with this title and give a date of 1979 [1], so there must indeed have been a version circulated earlier than the 1981 "A" version. Have you tried contacting the CSAIL archivist to see if they'd be interested in putting up a non-A version of 519? [1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=802784 , http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=990280
Yes I emailed them when I found it but got no response. I will email them again and see if they are interested.
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.
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.
If anyone using a Mac wants to experience this, there exists the retro terminal emulator "Cathode" which can emulate various modem speeds (along with curved glass, CRT phosphor persistence, etc) http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/
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…
Yes, I always assumed that was part of the motivation for "chunky" operations like forward/delete word, paragraph, etc. On a slow connection it made a big difference to be able to jump ahead by words, paragraphs, or "balanced expressions" rather than character-by-character. And VT100 terminals didn't have a mouse so there was no way to do something like click-drag to select a block of text.
What we decide is not worth while to add, the user can provide for himself. He can just as easily provide his own alternative to a feature if he does not like the way it works in the standard system.
Written before the PC police insisted upon alternating He/She pronouns, awkward constructions such as "He or she", or flatly incorrect usage, i.e. "their" as a singular.
What we decide is not worth while to add, the user can provide for himself. He can just as easily provide his own alternative to a feature if he does not like the way it works in the standard system. Written before the PC police insisted upon alternating He/She pronouns, awkward constructions such as "He or she", or flatly incorrect usage, i.e. "their" as a singular.
Has your quality of life really suffered so much now that you're encouraged to write to a broader audience?
I actually found an earlier version of this paper in my teachers room (published 1979). It's AI Memo 519 (the linked paper is 591A) and I can't find a reference to this anywhere. I even emailed Stallman and he couldn't remember when it was first published (he thought that it was published in 1981 first to). I uploaded it to archive.org: https://archive.org/details/MITAIMemo519 My teacher suspects he got it from a guy…
Surprised you got a reply via email. I thought he prefers snail mail.
There are a few papers circa 1980 that cite an AI Lab memo with this title and give a date of 1979 [1], so there must indeed have been a version circulated earlier than the 1981 "A" version. Have you tried contacting the CSAIL archivist to see if they'd be interested in putting up a non-A version of 519? [1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=802784 , http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=990280
Yes I emailed them when I found it but got no response. I will email them again and see if they are interested.
Is this it? https://ia601004.us.archive.org/32/items/MITAIMemo519/MIT-AI...
Yes that is the document I uploaded to IA, linked to it in my first comment.
Whoa, funny. I read half of this conversation last night, and the second half today, and mistakenly thought you were still looking for that document having forgotten what I read last night. I will leave my embarrassingly ridiculous comment above for posterity.