Cantrell’s teco was pretty fast and used a lot less resources than any of the Unix EMACS invocations. Gosling / CMU EMACS showed up in 81 on the Vax and is where mocklisp came from. Zimmerman EMACS may have been earlier at MIT but Steve sold it to CCA so it was not nearly as widespread. Noel may know more. We got a license from CCA in ‘84 and shipped it on the Masscomp systems.

Rms did like a number things gosling did and start to rewrite it. (The defaults were different from ITS was one of his issues). He released his version around 85. FWIW: There is still some bad blood wrt to that whole path best I can tell.

I think there were a couple of others.

On Thu, Aug 3, 2023 at 8:04 PM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:

As a longtime user and lover of ed/ex/vi, I don't know much about emacs, but lately I've been using it more (as it seems like any self-respecting lisper, has to at least have a passing acquaintance with it). I recently went off and got MACLISP running in ITS. As part of that exploration, I used EMACS, but not just any old emacs, emacs in it's first incarnation as a set of TECO macros. To me, it just seemed like EMACS. I won't bore you with the details - imagine lots of control and escape sequences, many of which are the same today as then. This was late 70's stuff.

My question for the group is - when did emacs arrive in unix and was it a full fledged text editor when it came or was it sitting on top of some other subssystem in unix? Was TECO ever on unix?

Will