Ron Natalie wrote:
Gosling Emacs was indeed written in C. But so is/was GNU EMACS. It
started by outright stealing not only one of Gosling’s earlier
(pre-commercial) releases but RMS made off with improvements done at
UNIPRESS.
However, after much wrangling between James, Unipress, and RMS, RMS
backed out the stuff stolen from UNIPRESS and chucked out Gosling’s
“mocklisp” interpretter for what RMS felt was a more correct “mlisp”
implementation. Of course, most of the lisp stuff was largely
original to RMS’s project. This accounts for the really anti-UNIX
ugliness in some of his keybindings that is always the thing I program
when I have to use a Xemacs implementation (who the hell thought using
BACKSPACE for “help” was a good idea? Well I know who, his
maloderous self used to show up at my house from time to time).
My coworkers always used to laugh at me. If there was no EMACS-like
editor on the machine (I also variously used Montgomery’s EMACS and
finally JOVE) on smaller machines that GosMacs was too heavy for), I
would just use “ed” (having been a master of that from when that was
all there was). I never learned vi, and if I was stuck using it, I
ran it in ex mode. I had a brief stint with the RandEditor AKA
Interactive Systems editor derived from it (InED).
Interesting how the Rand Editor seems to have been the choice of many.
Perkin-Elmer (later Concurrent) based their in-house office automation
software
("Paper Free in '83.") On dog-slow UniPlus SysIII (IIRC -- later
MicroXelos
UniPlus SysV based I think) on 68000 cpu 8 mhz machines. No virtual memory
a dog-crap slow video subsystem.
Of course I got a truck load of them when they dumped them and I used
them to do the two county wide newsfeed until the PC Unix stuff
became available.
http://www.1000bit.it/ad/bro/perkin/PerkinElmer7350.pdf
The nice one I had was an XF200 MicroXelos box -- which was RARE.
It was a minitower without the graphics and with room for a pair of
80mb MFM drives.
Did one of 'em for system and user accts and one for partial newsfeed.
--
Digital had it then. Don't you wish you could buy it now!
pechter-at-gmail.com http://xkcd.com/705/