21 Jul
2025
21 Jul
'25
11:55 a.m.
Paul Winalski writes:
The original version of EMACS was a set ot TECO
macros.
Yes, but not any TECO. The macros make heavy use of ITS TECO particulars.
TECO ran on TOPS-10, so the TECO macro version of
EMACS ought to have
been able to run there, too.
No, because TOPS-10 TECO was another flavor.
Or did EMACS depend on features of TECO not
implemented on TOPS-10?
Yes. Maybe a short history of TECO is in order. TECO started on the
MIT RLE PDP-1. It was ported to the AI lab PDP-1, and made to use its
display. When the AI lab traded the PDP-1 for a PDP-6, TECO was quickly
rewritten for that machine. DEC engineer Bob Clements brought a copy of
this PDP-6 TECO to Stanford when overseeing the installation of a PDP-6
here. He ported TECO to run on the PDP-6 Monitor and removed display
features. He then brought this version of TECO back to DEC, where it
because a popular editor across all of DEC's machines. This flavor of
TECO was called Standard TECO. Since it developed from an an early and
lobotimized TECO, it doesn't have a rich set of features.
Meanwhile back at MIT, PDP-6 TECO was moved to ITS, still keeping the
original display features. It developed quickly and acquired many
features that never made it to DEC. EMACS eventually appeared as the
culmination and merging of many display-oriented TECO macros. The
combination of TECO and EMACS was ported to TOPS-20 and TENEX.
By the way, there is an "EMACS-11" that runs on TECO-11, and I suppose
that is a flavor of Standard TECO.
21 Jul
21 Jul
2:24 p.m.
New subject: editor wars
On Mon, Jul 21, 2025, 5:55 AM Lars Brinkhoff <lars(a)nocrew.org> wrote:
By the way, there is an "EMACS-11" that runs
on TECO-11, and I suppose
that is a flavor of Standard TECO.
TECO-11 was, but it had didplay features. We had a screen oriented editor
written in TECO that I hacked on. But it has .TES files that was TECO
written with comments and whitespace. Those comment and whitespace where
removed with MUNGE. There is some connection to make (which make have been
part of it). There was a 60s joke burried in 'make love' where it would
print 'not war' that I added to FreeBSD make for a number of years.
The TECO-11 macros like this were nothing at all like EMACS. And IIIRC,
many of the TOPS20 Emacs macros had migrated to assembler, at least that's
what I recall seeing when I used the display macro source feature back in
school. Many were still in teco and made my head spin.
Warner
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