'Mother of All Editors' Emacs is 50

Arthur t Knackerbracket writes:

No lesser authority than the MIT Technology Review says that the Emacs editor has turned 50 years old. But then, it is biased - Emacs was invented in MIT's AI lab.

Simson Garfinkel's article is simply called EMACS turns 50, but the sub-heading explains why it matters more:

"How the MIT AI Lab's text editor gave birth to the free software movement."

There are multiple timelines and accounts of the origins of Emacs, and it is not a single monolithic application. The name is an abbreviation for "Editing MACroS", and the original editor for which this set of macros was developed was TECO - "Text Editor and COrrector," written by Dan Murphy in 1962. Murphydied earlier this year at the age of 83.

The inimitable Jamie Zawinski has an encyclopedic Emacs Timeline - as he mentions at the start, his interest being that he long ago maintained a fork of GNU Emacs, originally called Lucid Emacs. It's still around, under its later name XEmacs. There are a lot of forks and re-implementations of Emacs out there, and we are not going to go into all of them, or this article would become a book - one only interesting to programmer-archeologists (to use a term coined by the late great Vernor Vinge).

As for who originally wrote those Editing Macros, though, another history has quotations from several of the people involved: On the Origin of Emacs in 1976. (Note - some of the quotes still contain the | symbols that marked quoted text.)

This credits Lisp boffin Guy L. SteeleJr with the original work in 1975, but in it, Steele says:

"RMS is responsible for the names 'E' and 'EMACS'. RMS still deserves 99% or 99.9% or 99.99% or 99.999% of the credit for taking a package of TECO macros and turning it into the most powerful editor on the planet."

RMS is of course Richard Stallman, and the page also quotes some emails from RMS on October 23 and 31, 1976. Mind you, just a few years after the event, in a 1981 talk now preserved on the GNU website, Stallman said, "I began the development of EMACS in 1974 with an improvement to TECO". Like all the best FOSS, even in its very early stages, it was a collaborative effort - but around late October 1976 is when RMS took over the bulk of the development.

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