4 ms·

Though the author is confused about Emacs history, talking about Stallman's and Gosling's Emacs as if they were the same thing. IIRC (I was around the AI Lab a

by cpr 10y ago

Though the author is confused about Emacs history, talking about Stallman's and Gosling's Emacs as if they were the same thing. IIRC (I was around the AI Lab a bit after the fact) Richard Gabriel and Guy Steele (MIT AI Lab) wrote the original Emacs (editor macros) in TECO under MIT's ITS, which was a huge superset of the original DEC TECO. RMS took it over after a while, since RPG and GLS were mostly doing academic stuff. (Mike McMahon (MMcM) and others ported the ITS version to TOPS-20.) Meanwhile, Bernie Greenberg wrote an Emacs in Multics Lisp, which was a huge influence on future Emacs implementations. Eventually, RMS and others wrote the current Emacs. Gosling's Emacs (nicknamed Gosmacs, written while he was at CMU, I believe) was a C-based implementation for Unix, and a poor-man's subset of the real thing.

richardfontana 10y ago
FWIW, in 1983 RMS claimed to have been the "inventor of the much-imitated EMACS editor" in his famous 1983 GNU announcement (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/initial-announcement.en.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/initial-announcement.en.html) (by which he meant the original Emacs, not GNU Emacs which he proceeded to work on over the next couple of years before releasing it).
EdiX 10y ago
> Richard Gabriel and Guy Steele (MIT AI Lab) wrote the original Emacs AFAIK the first version of Emacs was written by Richard Stallman and Guy L. Steele, both wikipedia and jwz give partial credit to Stallman. [0] https://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html
- hga 10y ago
  Wikipedia??? Please, and I don't believe jwz was an eyewitness, plus that link no longer works EDIT: I forget what he did with redirects from this site, but all he says that I could quickly find is: Dramatis Personae: Richard Stallman: creator of Emacs, founder of the FSF. It's not a serious statement of provenance, and especially in the context he'd want to be generous towards RMS there before he describes the sort of behavior those of us who knew RMS well was well known for by the '70s.... Eyewitnesses like Ed Schwalenberg (private communication) and the late Daniel Weinberg (search for his revived blog, which also has testimony from David Moon who did a bit of the initial work, and as I recall others) say that RMS arrived a bit late in the game, but deserves great credit for turning their beginning into such a major thing even/especially in the TECO era. And that's basically RMS's MO, he takes good beginnings and (generally) makes them into rather nice things, GCC might be the only well known exception where he started from scratch, but then again compilers were a pretty well established thing back then. For original ideas and such, look to things like the GPL, and as I recall he is said to have done some important AI research before he got lured away to systems and tools.
  - hga 10y ago
    And for the Wikipedia cite, I'll reply with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs which I used to find the RMS Slashdot AMA quote that confirms the fork.
  - cwzwarich 10y ago
    GCC wasn't started from scratch either. It was heavily based on the PO project by Jack Davidson and Chris Fraser.
    - hga 10y ago
      But did he take code, or only the ideas from that project?
hga 10y ago
Stallman's and Gosling's Emacs as if they were the same thing They were, Gnu Emacs is a fork of what was then an old version of Gosling's Emacs. This was something contemporaneously admitted to by RMS, claiming he had an email authorizing it, but he, to my memory, never even produced a copy of it. To someone intimately familiar with Gosling Emacs, as I was at the time, working for UniPress, this was totally obvious. Amusingly, this was perhaps the one time I could have been an expert witness of sorts, but the two owners of UniPress were menches and knew legal action was a bad idea (they'd had their own horror story forming the company after the broke from [redacted because I'm not 100% sure of my memory, but a name you'd recognize from that era]'s company, which they won when the latter's lawyer was caught burglarizing their office) and felt sales of their supported, on the then zillions of available Unix platforms (their unique selling proposition) Emacs would only be helped by RMS's version, at least for a good long while. Eventually, RMS and others wrote the current Emacs. See above, not at all. Substantially rewritten, but in the legal sense it's a derivative work. And exhibit number 1 in the list of horrific examples of RMS's stewardship of GNU/the FSF/etc., he took a chance that if it had gone badly would have resulted in GNU being stillborn or nearly so, much like happened to BSD. The rest of your history is right (I have eyewitness testimony on the genesis from one of the beta testers, Ed Schwalenberg), except for Gosling Emacs being "a poor man's substitute", it was industrial strength, including not being an ersatz Emacs. That is, it had a "Mocklisp" byte code compiled extension language (where else have we heard of this sort of thing from James Gosling? :-) in which a fair amount of functionality was embedded, it just wasn't a real LISP (but of course neither was TECO), and it diverged a fair amount in default keybindings etc. There were also some other EMACS versions written in this in-between period, including SINE for the predecessor of the Media Lab's Multics like Magic OS, EINE and I think ZWEI, the latter two the ones for the Lisp Machine.
- cpr 10y ago
  I'm well aware of UniPress (didn't they start out selling Brian Reid's Scribe commercially?) and Michael Shamus' rather jailhouse-lawyer-ish behavior. But hearing that GNU Emacs started from Gosmacs is just hard to believe. If you were there and say so, I'll have to believe. ;-) It was certainly nowhere near as extensible as GNU Emacs, at least in my years of experience with it.

by cpr 10y ago

richardfontana 10y ago

FWIW, in 1983 RMS claimed to have been the "inventor of the much-imitated EMACS editor" in his famous 1983 GNU announcement (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/initial-announcement.en.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/initial-announcement.en.html) (by which he meant the original Emacs, not GNU Emacs which he proceeded to work on over the next couple of years before releasing it).

EdiX 10y ago

> Richard Gabriel and Guy Steele (MIT AI Lab) wrote the original Emacs AFAIK the first version of Emacs was written by Richard Stallman and Guy L. Steele, both wikipedia and jwz give partial credit to Stallman. [0] https://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html

hga 10y ago
Wikipedia??? Please, and I don't believe jwz was an eyewitness, plus that link no longer works EDIT: I forget what he did with redirects from this site, but all he says that I could quickly find is: Dramatis Personae: Richard Stallman: creator of Emacs, founder of the FSF. It's not a serious statement of provenance, and especially in the context he'd want to be generous towards RMS there before he describes the sort of behavior those of us who knew RMS well was well known for by the '70s.... Eyewitnesses like Ed Schwalenberg (private communication) and the late Daniel Weinberg (search for his revived blog, which also has testimony from David Moon who did a bit of the initial work, and as I recall others) say that RMS arrived a bit late in the game, but deserves great credit for turning their beginning into such a major thing even/especially in the TECO era. And that's basically RMS's MO, he takes good beginnings and (generally) makes them into rather nice things, GCC might be the only well known exception where he started from scratch, but then again compilers were a pretty well established thing back then. For original ideas and such, look to things like the GPL, and as I recall he is said to have done some important AI research before he got lured away to systems and tools.
- hga 10y ago
  And for the Wikipedia cite, I'll reply with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs which I used to find the RMS Slashdot AMA quote that confirms the fork.
- cwzwarich 10y ago
  GCC wasn't started from scratch either. It was heavily based on the PO project by Jack Davidson and Chris Fraser.
  - hga 10y ago
    But did he take code, or only the ideas from that project?

hga 10y ago

Stallman's and Gosling's Emacs as if they were the same thing They were, Gnu Emacs is a fork of what was then an old version of Gosling's Emacs. This was something contemporaneously admitted to by RMS, claiming he had an email authorizing it, but he, to my memory, never even produced a copy of it. To someone intimately familiar with Gosling Emacs, as I was at the time, working for UniPress, this was totally obvious. Amusingly, this was perhaps the one time I could have been an expert witness of sorts, but the two owners of UniPress were menches and knew legal action was a bad idea (they'd had their own horror story forming the company after the broke from [redacted because I'm not 100% sure of my memory, but a name you'd recognize from that era]'s company, which they won when the latter's lawyer was caught burglarizing their office) and felt sales of their supported, on the then zillions of available Unix platforms (their unique selling proposition) Emacs would only be helped by RMS's version, at least for a good long while. Eventually, RMS and others wrote the current Emacs. See above, not at all. Substantially rewritten, but in the legal sense it's a derivative work. And exhibit number 1 in the list of horrific examples of RMS's stewardship of GNU/the FSF/etc., he took a chance that if it had gone badly would have resulted in GNU being stillborn or nearly so, much like happened to BSD. The rest of your history is right (I have eyewitness testimony on the genesis from one of the beta testers, Ed Schwalenberg), except for Gosling Emacs being "a poor man's substitute", it was industrial strength, including not being an ersatz Emacs. That is, it had a "Mocklisp" byte code compiled extension language (where else have we heard of this sort of thing from James Gosling? :-) in which a fair amount of functionality was embedded, it just wasn't a real LISP (but of course neither was TECO), and it diverged a fair amount in default keybindings etc. There were also some other EMACS versions written in this in-between period, including SINE for the predecessor of the Media Lab's Multics like Magic OS, EINE and I think ZWEI, the latter two the ones for the Lisp Machine.

cpr 10y ago
I'm well aware of UniPress (didn't they start out selling Brian Reid's Scribe commercially?) and Michael Shamus' rather jailhouse-lawyer-ish behavior. But hearing that GNU Emacs started from Gosmacs is just hard to believe. If you were there and say so, I'll have to believe. ;-) It was certainly nowhere near as extensible as GNU Emacs, at least in my years of experience with it.