You are likely thinking of this Steve Yegge essay: https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-ba

You are likely thinking of this Steve Yegge essay: https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel Search for "Then you know Mailman", and you'll find the bit I'm thinking of. It doesn't say they built multiple systems around Emacs, but it does say Mailman was built in Emacs Lisp, and that they had people writing Emacs extensions to further Mailman's functionality. (And that their non-technical customer service folks loved Mailman.) Edit: found more-canonical URL.