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).

From: TUHS [mailto:tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org] On Behalf Of Michael Kerpan
Sent: Sunday, February 26, 2017 11:23 AM
To: tuhs@tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Un-released/internal/special UNIX versions/ports during the years?

On Feb 26, 2017 10:52 AM, "Joerg Schilling" <schily@schily.net> wrote:

Tim Bradshaw <tfb@tfeb.org> wrote:

>
> > On 26 Feb 2017, at 14:54, Joerg Schilling <schily@schily.net> wrote:
> >
> > GNU EMACS is based on the Gosling EMACS and this did already include the LISP
> > interpreter.
>
> Well, Gosling Emacs had mocklisp which, despite its name, isn't a Lisp.  GNU Emacs has elisp which *is* a Lisp (albeit a fairly horrid one).

OK, then Gosling just had the idea of including lisp.

IIRC, Gosling EMACS was mainly written in C, and Mocklisp was merely an extension language. GNU EMACS is mostly written in LISP, with the C mainly being used to implement the LISP interpreter. That's a pretty big architectural difference there.

Mike