On Thu, Nov 3, 2022 at 4:55 PM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

There were a diversity of emacs clones for unix as well...
Absolutely...

But the first in wide used in the UNIX world was Gosling EMACS which appeared outside of CMU soon after UCB dropped 4.1 in early 1980, probably the next was Zimmerman (a.k.a. CCA) EMACS, then GNU hacked Gosling's version (that strange trip has been discussed elsewhere and I'll not add it here).  Zimmer's version was 'truer' to the original MIT/PDP-10 version from ITS than Gosling but Steve had built it when he worked for CCA so it was licensed (which we had a Masscomp and made available to our customers).  To my knowledge Gosling's version never fit on any PDP-11 nor Gnu, I'm not sure if Steve ever got his to work on a split I/D [Noel might know].   I do know some of my MIT friends used to grouse about the differences between CMU EMACS and ITS EMACS. That said, there was also at least one microemacs which was originally for CPM and MSDOS IIRC, that got moved a number of the UNIX boxes which may be what you are referring.  I seem to remember that was released on netnews and was a lot smaller.  I never messed with it, because by then I had the address space of and I could run Gosling or Zimmerman.