4 ms·

I was a but surprised that he pointed to cost as an advantage of vi over emacs - I never heard anyone claim emacs costs hundreds of dollars; it's free and open

by jll29 6y ago

I was a but surprised that he pointed to cost as an advantage of vi over emacs - I never heard anyone claim emacs costs hundreds of dollars; it's free and open source, and to the best of my knowledge always has been.

DonHopkins 6y ago
Bill was probably referring to what RMS calls "Evil Software Hoarder Emacs" aka "UniPress Emacs", which was the commercially supported version of James Gosling's Unix Emacs (aka Gosling Emacs / Gosmacs / UniPress Emacs / Unimacs) sold by UniPress Software, and it actually cost a thousand or so for a source license (but I don't remember how much a binary license was). Sun had the source installed on their file servers while Gosling was working there, which was probably how Bill Joy had access to it, although it was likely just a free courtesy license, so Gosling didn't have to pay to license his own code back from UniPress to use at Sun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs I worked at UniPress on the Emacs display driver for the NeWS window system (the PostScript based window system that James Gosling also wrote), with Mike "Emacs Hacker Boss" Gallaher, who was charge of Emacs development at UniPress. One day during the 80's Mike and I were wandering around an East coast science fiction convention, and ran into RMS, who's a regular fixture at such events. Mike said: "Hello, Richard. I heard a rumor that your house burned down. That's terrible! Is it true?" RMS replied right back: "Yes, it did. But where you work, you probably heard about it in advance." Everybody laughed. It was a joke! Nobody's feelings were hurt. He's a funny guy, quick on his feet! Here's an old photo of RMS (in the center) and Mike (on the right), with RMS holding a gerbil wrapped in duct tape, pondering about how to answer the question "Why do you wrap a gerbil in duct tape?" (You can google the answer... And it's only fake stuffed gerbil for cats.) http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/images/jsol-rms-gerbil-liz-mg.jpg http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/images/jsol-rms-gerbil-liz-m... Here's mmccaff's story about working for UniPress, and my reply, explaining the "Evil Software Hoarder" expression, and linking to RMS's infamous natalism flame: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6646978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6646978 And a description of UniPress Emacs's vi emulation mode, which addressed the usage pattern of people who liked to quickly run vi to edit a file, then save and quit back into the shell, which you couldn't just emulate by firing up a new emacs every time, since emacs takes so much longer than vi to start up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9398028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9398028 >DonHopkins on Apr 18, 2015 | on: Spacemacs – Emacs advanced kit focused on Evil >UniPress "Evil Software Hoarder [TM]" Emacs had a vi emulation mode such that when you typed ":q", it flipped you over into an Emacs shell window with key bindings to behave just like you'd expect had you actually exited your text editor. Of course the shell mode was hacked so "vi foo.c" would flip you back into a vi-mode buffer on foo.c. Poor innocent vi users didn't even realize they hadn't left the editor! It was kind of like being in the Ematrix. Here's some more stuff about the tabbed windows and pie menus I implemented for the NeWS display driver for UniPress Emacs (with some links to MockLisp and PostScript source code) -- at the time (around 1988), Gnu Emacs did not have multiple windows, pie menus, or tabbed windows (and still doesn't have pie menus or tabbed windows 33 years later, alas): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18837730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18837730 >That's how I implemented tabbed windows in 1988 for the NeWS window system and UniPress Emacs (aka Gosling Emacs aka Evil Software Hoarder Emacs), which supported multiple windows on NeWS and X11 long before Gnu Emacs did. There's a screen snapshot of UniPress Emacs with tabbed windows and pie menus, running as the HyperTIES hypermedia authoring tool, on the wikipedia page about tabs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:HyperTIESAuthoring.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy... More stuff about tabbed windows in Emacs, the HyperTIES hypermedia browser, the Emacs based HyperTIES authoring tool, and other NeWS implementations of tabbed window frames and window managers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18837730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18837730 Not only could UniPress Emacs support multiple frames, but it could also support multiple display drivers (like X11, NeWS, SunView, as well as text), and you could disconnect the display and Emacs would keep running, and then reconnect it to another display later, without losing all your work and context. So crashing your window server or disconnecting your modem didn't lose your emacs! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19743314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19743314 DonHopkins on Apr 24, 2019 | on: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (20... Good point -- I haven't tried gnu emacs's X11 driver in ages, so I'll give it another try. Does gnu emacs's X11 display driver finally have a way to keep running after the X connection terminates, and reconnect to a new X server (or multiple X servers at once)? Under screen, I keep long running emacs sessions with multiple shell buffers running for months and sometimes years, with all the files I'm working on opened up. Each shell buffer might be configured for some branch of some code, with an interactive python or whatever shell running the code connected to the database, with a bunch of useful commands and context in its history. It's a lot of work to recreate all that state. (Digression: Bash has no way to save and merge and recreate and manage parallel history threads, does it? Or does the last shell that exits just stomp on the one history?). Back in my Evil Software Hoarder days, I worked on the NeWS display driver for UniPress Emacs 2.20, and later on the NeWS display driver for gnu emacs. Here's a brochure from February 1988 about UniPress Emacs 2.20 and "SoftWire" (NeWS without graphics). https://www.donhopkins.com/home/ties/scans/WhatIsEmacs.pdf https://www.donhopkins.com/home/ties/scans/WhatIsEmacs.pdf It supported multiple display drivers (text, X11, NeWS, SunView), as well as multiple window frames on each of those displays (which gnu emacs didn't support at the time), and you could disconnect and reconnect to a long running emacs later. In effect it was a "multi user emacs" since different users could type into multiple displays at the same time (although weird stuff could still happen since the classic Emacs interface wasn't designed for that). Emacs 2.20 Demo (NeWS, multiple frames, tabbed windows, pie menus, hypermedia authoring): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU Here are two different example of Emacs NeWS display drivers (one for UniPress Emacs 2.20, the other for Gnu Emacs 18) showing where the rubber hits the road in NeWS client/server programming of an emacs NeWS display driver. They both download a PostScript file to NeWS that handles most of the user interface, window management, menus, input handling, font measurement, text drawing, etc, and they have a corresponding C driver on the emacs side. There's also a "cps" file that defines the protocol (which is send in tokenized binary instead of plain text), and generates C headers and code stubs. Together they implement an optimized, high level, application specific "emacs protocol" that the client and server use to communicate: Emacs 2.20 NeWS display driver (supporting multiple tabbed windows and pie menus in the NeWS Lite Toolkit): https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs.ps.txt https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs.ps.txt https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/TrmPS.c https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/TrmPS.c Gnu Emacs 18 NeWS display driver (supporting a single tabbed windows and pie menus in The NeWS Toolkit 2.0): https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/src/tnt.ps https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/src/tnt.ps https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/src/tnt.c https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/src/tnt.c https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/src/tnt_cps.cps https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/src/tnt_cps.cps https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/lisp/term/tnt-win.el https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/lisp/term/tnt-w... TL;DR: Lots of gross hacky PostScript code and snarky comments, like throttling beeps to one per second and flashing random colors when it beeps faster, or preventing emacs from core dumping: % Annoy the user % /^G { % - => - currenttime NextBeepTime cmptimeval 1 eq { beep } { gsave self setcanvas random 255 mul cvi setpixel 6 setrasteropcode clippath gsave fill grestore FlashTime sleep fill grestore } ifelse currenttime BeepTime NextBeepTime addtimeval pop } def % Return the minimum size to keep emacs from core dumping % /minsize { % - => w h /?validate self send CharWidth 10 mul Border dup add add LineHeight 5 mul Border dup add add % XXX: Any smaller and it core dumps! } def
ido 6y ago
maybe cost in system resources? EMACS used to require a lot of RAM ("Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping").
- hnlmorg 6y ago
  No, emacs used to be non-free software. Bare in mind open source (as we understand it today) is very different to what it was like in the 80s. Also internet connections (if you were lucky enough to have one in the first place) was several orders of magnitude slower and more expensive thus software was usually distributed via snail mail and usually came with a (hefty) price tag. In many ways, this is the golden era for developers. Never has so many tools been free, easy to access and in abundance. Though I'll always have fond memories of the 80s development for it's simplicity.
thakoppno 6y ago
> EMACS is a nice editor too, but because it costs hundreds of dollars, there will always be people who won't buy it. That surprised me too.
- jillesvangurp 6y ago
  OSS was not a widespread thing until much later, around the time of the early web and Linux. People were sharing code of course but trying to monetize development tools was perfectly reasonable at the time. Licensing was in general messy and not very formalized (hence the existence of several BSD forks). There were may versions of unix, several of which were proprietary and built by various hardware companies (like Sun's Solaris). Unix on PCs was even less of a thing at the time as PCs were still pretty limited. The 80386 with 32 bit instructions was only introduced in 1985. I'm not sure there ever was a unix version capable of running on 16 bit intel CPUs before that. So people programming for and using Unix hardware were mainly doing that professionally or in an academic setting and not on some home computer (as they were referred to once upon a time). So, companies donating OSS software was not a big thing. Bill Joy of course worked on BSD kernels and distributions and would have technically been one of the early OSS developers. So, open sourcing vi was probably a natural thing for him when he created it in 1976 and released it along with the first version of BSD while at Berkeley. So, he was an academic at the time and not selling software for profit yet.
  - rjsw 6y ago
    BSD wasn't open source back then, you needed to have an AT&T source code licence as well.
    - mprovost 6y ago
      Right, if you look at the early BSD sources [0] it's not a complete OS - there's no kernel. It's just a bunch of utilities that you were supposed to install on an already running AT&T system. [0] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/tree/BSD-1-Snapshot-Development https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/tree/BSD-1-S...
    - 6y ago
bshimmin 6y ago
Gosling Emacs was actually sold by UniPress in the early eighties, causing a lot of fuss and consternation.
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  To be fair, RMS a right to fuss and complain, because UniPress did kind of pull the rug out from under him. The display update optimization code that Gosling wrote was pretty ugly but amazingly brilliant dynamic programming stuff, and it had a skull-and-crossbones warning in the comments. RMS originally used the display update code from Gosling Emacs, but then rewrote it all from scratch for later versions of Gnu Emacs, after UniPress threatened him not to use it. As modems and networks became faster, and people started using window systems instead of terminals, having an "Ultra-hot screen management package" became less important. But it's a really cool algorithm, a great example of dynamic programming, and Gosling even published a paper about it! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22849522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22849522 DonHopkins 10 months ago | on: Enemy AI: chasing a player without Navigation2D or... James Gosling's Emacs screen redisplay algorithm also used similar "dynamic programming techniques" to compute the minimal cost path through a cost matrix of string edit operations (the costs depended i.e. on the number of characters to draw, length of the escape codes to insert/delete lines/characters, padding for slow terminals, etc). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs >Gosling Emacs was especially noteworthy because of the effective redisplay code, which used a dynamic programming technique to solve the classical string-to-string correction problem. The algorithm was quite sophisticated; that section of the source was headed by a skull-and-crossbones in ASCII art, warning any would-be improver that even if they thought they understood how the display code worked, they probably did not. https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/skull-and-crossbones.txt https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/skull-and-crossbon... Trivia: That "Skull and Crossbones" ASCII art is originally from Brian Reid's Scribe program, and is not copyrighted. https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/mw/display.c https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/mw/display.c /* 1 2 3 4 .... Each Mij represents the minumum cost of +---+---+---+---+----- rearranging the first i lines to map onto 1 | | | | | the first j lines (the j direction +---+---+---+---+----- represents the desired contents of a line, 2 | | \| ^ | | i the current contents). The algorithm +---+---\-|-+---+----- used is a dynamic programming one, where 3 | | <-+Mij| | M[i,j] = min( M[i-1,j], +---+---+---+---+----- M[i,j-1]+redraw cost for j,2 4 | | | | | M[i-1,j-1]+the cost of +---+---+---+---+----- converting line i to line j); . | | | | | Line i can be converted to line j by either . just drawing j, or if they match, by moving . line i to line j (with insert/delete line) */ https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/EmacsRedisplayAlgorithm.pdf https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/EmacsRedisplayAlgorith... https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1159890.806463 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1159890.806463 A redisplay algorithm, by James Gosling. Abstract This paper presents an algorithm for updating the image displayed on a conventional video terminal. It assumes that the terminal is capable of doing the usual insert/delete line and insert/delete character operations. It takes as input a description of the image currently on the screen and a description of the new image desired and produces a series of operations to do the desired transformation in a near-optimal manner. The algorithm is interesting because it applies results from the theoretical string-to-string correction problem (a generalization of the problem of finding a longest common subsequence), to a problem that is usually approached with crude ad-hoc techniques. [...] 6. Conclusion The redisplay algorithm described in this paper is used in an Emacs-like editor for Unix and a structure editor. It's performance has been quite good: to redraw everything on the screen (when everything has changed) takes about 0.12 seconds CPU time on a VAX 11/780 running Unix. Using the standard file typing program, about 0.025 seconds of CPU time are needed to type one screenful of text. Emacs averages about 0.004 CPU seconds per keystroke (with one call on the redisplay per keystroke). Although in the interests of efficency we have stripped down algorithm 5 to algorithm 6 the result is still an algorithm which has a firm theoretical basis and which is superior to the usual ad-hoc approach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming
lizknope 6y ago
Emacs has a long history with so many versions and editors with "emacs" in the name but not necessarily what we think of emacs today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs In the 1970's there was TECO and then E. Emacs kind of grew out of these editors. James Gosling of Java fame had his own Gosling Emacs version that I believe was sold for money GNU Emacs only started in 1984 and had its initial release in 1985. This interview is from 1984 so we would need to know what version of Emacs is Bill Joy referring to specifically. Also before fast internet connections the FSF used to sell GNU tools on tape and then CD This newsletter from 1994 says the CD costs $400. I don't know what the price was in 1984 but maybe Bill Joy is referring to that but the Free Software Foundation was only founded in 1985. https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull16.html#SEC38 https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull16.html#SEC38
- rjsw 6y ago
  From memory, a GNU tape cost me $200 in 1986.
badsectoracula 6y ago
In addition to what lizknope wrote, there are still some commercial Emacs-like editors, perhaps most notable being Epsilon by Lugaru Software: https://www.lugaru.com/ https://www.lugaru.com/ Epsilon was initially released in 1984 for PC/DOS and is still under development.

by jll29 6y ago

DonHopkins 6y ago

Bill was probably referring to what RMS calls "Evil Software Hoarder Emacs" aka "UniPress Emacs", which was the commercially supported version of James Gosling's Unix Emacs (aka Gosling Emacs / Gosmacs / UniPress Emacs / Unimacs) sold by UniPress Software, and it actually cost a thousand or so for a source license (but I don't remember how much a binary license was). Sun had the source installed on their file servers while Gosling was working there, which was probably how Bill Joy had access to it, although it was likely just a free courtesy license, so Gosling didn't have to pay to license his own code back from UniPress to use at Sun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs I worked at UniPress on the Emacs display driver for the NeWS window system (the PostScript based window system that James Gosling also wrote), with Mike "Emacs Hacker Boss" Gallaher, who was charge of Emacs development at UniPress. One day during the 80's Mike and I were wandering around an East coast science fiction convention, and ran into RMS, who's a regular fixture at such events. Mike said: "Hello, Richard. I heard a rumor that your house burned down. That's terrible! Is it true?" RMS replied right back: "Yes, it did. But where you work, you probably heard about it in advance." Everybody laughed. It was a joke! Nobody's feelings were hurt. He's a funny guy, quick on his feet! Here's an old photo of RMS (in the center) and Mike (on the right), with RMS holding a gerbil wrapped in duct tape, pondering about how to answer the question "Why do you wrap a gerbil in duct tape?" (You can google the answer... And it's only fake stuffed gerbil for cats.) http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/images/jsol-rms-gerbil-liz-mg.jpg http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/images/jsol-rms-gerbil-liz-m... Here's mmccaff's story about working for UniPress, and my reply, explaining the "Evil Software Hoarder" expression, and linking to RMS's infamous natalism flame: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6646978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6646978 And a description of UniPress Emacs's vi emulation mode, which addressed the usage pattern of people who liked to quickly run vi to edit a file, then save and quit back into the shell, which you couldn't just emulate by firing up a new emacs every time, since emacs takes so much longer than vi to start up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9398028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9398028 >DonHopkins on Apr 18, 2015 | on: Spacemacs – Emacs advanced kit focused on Evil >UniPress "Evil Software Hoarder [TM]" Emacs had a vi emulation mode such that when you typed ":q", it flipped you over into an Emacs shell window with key bindings to behave just like you'd expect had you actually exited your text editor. Of course the shell mode was hacked so "vi foo.c" would flip you back into a vi-mode buffer on foo.c. Poor innocent vi users didn't even realize they hadn't left the editor! It was kind of like being in the Ematrix. Here's some more stuff about the tabbed windows and pie menus I implemented for the NeWS display driver for UniPress Emacs (with some links to MockLisp and PostScript source code) -- at the time (around 1988), Gnu Emacs did not have multiple windows, pie menus, or tabbed windows (and still doesn't have pie menus or tabbed windows 33 years later, alas): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18837730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18837730 >That's how I implemented tabbed windows in 1988 for the NeWS window system and UniPress Emacs (aka Gosling Emacs aka Evil Software Hoarder Emacs), which supported multiple windows on NeWS and X11 long before Gnu Emacs did. There's a screen snapshot of UniPress Emacs with tabbed windows and pie menus, running as the HyperTIES hypermedia authoring tool, on the wikipedia page about tabs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:HyperTIESAuthoring.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy... More stuff about tabbed windows in Emacs, the HyperTIES hypermedia browser, the Emacs based HyperTIES authoring tool, and other NeWS implementations of tabbed window frames and window managers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18837730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18837730 Not only could UniPress Emacs support multiple frames, but it could also support multiple display drivers (like X11, NeWS, SunView, as well as text), and you could disconnect the display and Emacs would keep running, and then reconnect it to another display later, without losing all your work and context. So crashing your window server or disconnecting your modem didn't lose your emacs! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19743314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19743314 DonHopkins on Apr 24, 2019 | on: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (20... Good point -- I haven't tried gnu emacs's X11 driver in ages, so I'll give it another try. Does gnu emacs's X11 display driver finally have a way to keep running after the X connection terminates, and reconnect to a new X server (or multiple X servers at once)? Under screen, I keep long running emacs sessions with multiple shell buffers running for months and sometimes years, with all the files I'm working on opened up. Each shell buffer might be configured for some branch of some code, with an interactive python or whatever shell running the code connected to the database, with a bunch of useful commands and context in its history. It's a lot of work to recreate all that state. (Digression: Bash has no way to save and merge and recreate and manage parallel history threads, does it? Or does the last shell that exits just stomp on the one history?). Back in my Evil Software Hoarder days, I worked on the NeWS display driver for UniPress Emacs 2.20, and later on the NeWS display driver for gnu emacs. Here's a brochure from February 1988 about UniPress Emacs 2.20 and "SoftWire" (NeWS without graphics). https://www.donhopkins.com/home/ties/scans/WhatIsEmacs.pdf https://www.donhopkins.com/home/ties/scans/WhatIsEmacs.pdf It supported multiple display drivers (text, X11, NeWS, SunView), as well as multiple window frames on each of those displays (which gnu emacs didn't support at the time), and you could disconnect and reconnect to a long running emacs later. In effect it was a "multi user emacs" since different users could type into multiple displays at the same time (although weird stuff could still happen since the classic Emacs interface wasn't designed for that). Emacs 2.20 Demo (NeWS, multiple frames, tabbed windows, pie menus, hypermedia authoring): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU Here are two different example of Emacs NeWS display drivers (one for UniPress Emacs 2.20, the other for Gnu Emacs 18) showing where the rubber hits the road in NeWS client/server programming of an emacs NeWS display driver. They both download a PostScript file to NeWS that handles most of the user interface, window management, menus, input handling, font measurement, text drawing, etc, and they have a corresponding C driver on the emacs side. There's also a "cps" file that defines the protocol (which is send in tokenized binary instead of plain text), and generates C headers and code stubs. Together they implement an optimized, high level, application specific "emacs protocol" that the client and server use to communicate: Emacs 2.20 NeWS display driver (supporting multiple tabbed windows and pie menus in the NeWS Lite Toolkit): https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs.ps.txt https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs.ps.txt https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/TrmPS.c https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/TrmPS.c Gnu Emacs 18 NeWS display driver (supporting a single tabbed windows and pie menus in The NeWS Toolkit 2.0): https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/src/tnt.ps https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/src/tnt.ps https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/src/tnt.c https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/src/tnt.c https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/src/tnt_cps.cps https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/src/tnt_cps.cps https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/lisp/term/tnt-win.el https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/lisp/term/tnt-w... TL;DR: Lots of gross hacky PostScript code and snarky comments, like throttling beeps to one per second and flashing random colors when it beeps faster, or preventing emacs from core dumping: % Annoy the user % /^G { % - => - currenttime NextBeepTime cmptimeval 1 eq { beep } { gsave self setcanvas random 255 mul cvi setpixel 6 setrasteropcode clippath gsave fill grestore FlashTime sleep fill grestore } ifelse currenttime BeepTime NextBeepTime addtimeval pop } def % Return the minimum size to keep emacs from core dumping % /minsize { % - => w h /?validate self send CharWidth 10 mul Border dup add add LineHeight 5 mul Border dup add add % XXX: Any smaller and it core dumps! } def

ido 6y ago

maybe cost in system resources? EMACS used to require a lot of RAM ("Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping").

hnlmorg 6y ago
No, emacs used to be non-free software. Bare in mind open source (as we understand it today) is very different to what it was like in the 80s. Also internet connections (if you were lucky enough to have one in the first place) was several orders of magnitude slower and more expensive thus software was usually distributed via snail mail and usually came with a (hefty) price tag. In many ways, this is the golden era for developers. Never has so many tools been free, easy to access and in abundance. Though I'll always have fond memories of the 80s development for it's simplicity.

thakoppno 6y ago

> EMACS is a nice editor too, but because it costs hundreds of dollars, there will always be people who won't buy it. That surprised me too.

jillesvangurp 6y ago
OSS was not a widespread thing until much later, around the time of the early web and Linux. People were sharing code of course but trying to monetize development tools was perfectly reasonable at the time. Licensing was in general messy and not very formalized (hence the existence of several BSD forks). There were may versions of unix, several of which were proprietary and built by various hardware companies (like Sun's Solaris). Unix on PCs was even less of a thing at the time as PCs were still pretty limited. The 80386 with 32 bit instructions was only introduced in 1985. I'm not sure there ever was a unix version capable of running on 16 bit intel CPUs before that. So people programming for and using Unix hardware were mainly doing that professionally or in an academic setting and not on some home computer (as they were referred to once upon a time). So, companies donating OSS software was not a big thing. Bill Joy of course worked on BSD kernels and distributions and would have technically been one of the early OSS developers. So, open sourcing vi was probably a natural thing for him when he created it in 1976 and released it along with the first version of BSD while at Berkeley. So, he was an academic at the time and not selling software for profit yet.
- rjsw 6y ago
  BSD wasn't open source back then, you needed to have an AT&T source code licence as well.
  - mprovost 6y ago
    Right, if you look at the early BSD sources [0] it's not a complete OS - there's no kernel. It's just a bunch of utilities that you were supposed to install on an already running AT&T system. [0] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/tree/BSD-1-Snapshot-Development https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/tree/BSD-1-S...
  - 6y ago

bshimmin 6y ago

Gosling Emacs was actually sold by UniPress in the early eighties, causing a lot of fuss and consternation.

DonHopkins 6y ago
To be fair, RMS a right to fuss and complain, because UniPress did kind of pull the rug out from under him. The display update optimization code that Gosling wrote was pretty ugly but amazingly brilliant dynamic programming stuff, and it had a skull-and-crossbones warning in the comments. RMS originally used the display update code from Gosling Emacs, but then rewrote it all from scratch for later versions of Gnu Emacs, after UniPress threatened him not to use it. As modems and networks became faster, and people started using window systems instead of terminals, having an "Ultra-hot screen management package" became less important. But it's a really cool algorithm, a great example of dynamic programming, and Gosling even published a paper about it! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22849522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22849522 DonHopkins 10 months ago | on: Enemy AI: chasing a player without Navigation2D or... James Gosling's Emacs screen redisplay algorithm also used similar "dynamic programming techniques" to compute the minimal cost path through a cost matrix of string edit operations (the costs depended i.e. on the number of characters to draw, length of the escape codes to insert/delete lines/characters, padding for slow terminals, etc). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs >Gosling Emacs was especially noteworthy because of the effective redisplay code, which used a dynamic programming technique to solve the classical string-to-string correction problem. The algorithm was quite sophisticated; that section of the source was headed by a skull-and-crossbones in ASCII art, warning any would-be improver that even if they thought they understood how the display code worked, they probably did not. https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/skull-and-crossbones.txt https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/skull-and-crossbon... Trivia: That "Skull and Crossbones" ASCII art is originally from Brian Reid's Scribe program, and is not copyrighted. https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/mw/display.c https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/mw/display.c /* 1 2 3 4 .... Each Mij represents the minumum cost of +---+---+---+---+----- rearranging the first i lines to map onto 1 | | | | | the first j lines (the j direction +---+---+---+---+----- represents the desired contents of a line, 2 | | \| ^ | | i the current contents). The algorithm +---+---\-|-+---+----- used is a dynamic programming one, where 3 | | <-+Mij| | M[i,j] = min( M[i-1,j], +---+---+---+---+----- M[i,j-1]+redraw cost for j,2 4 | | | | | M[i-1,j-1]+the cost of +---+---+---+---+----- converting line i to line j); . | | | | | Line i can be converted to line j by either . just drawing j, or if they match, by moving . line i to line j (with insert/delete line) */ https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/EmacsRedisplayAlgorithm.pdf https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/EmacsRedisplayAlgorith... https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1159890.806463 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1159890.806463 A redisplay algorithm, by James Gosling. Abstract This paper presents an algorithm for updating the image displayed on a conventional video terminal. It assumes that the terminal is capable of doing the usual insert/delete line and insert/delete character operations. It takes as input a description of the image currently on the screen and a description of the new image desired and produces a series of operations to do the desired transformation in a near-optimal manner. The algorithm is interesting because it applies results from the theoretical string-to-string correction problem (a generalization of the problem of finding a longest common subsequence), to a problem that is usually approached with crude ad-hoc techniques. [...] 6. Conclusion The redisplay algorithm described in this paper is used in an Emacs-like editor for Unix and a structure editor. It's performance has been quite good: to redraw everything on the screen (when everything has changed) takes about 0.12 seconds CPU time on a VAX 11/780 running Unix. Using the standard file typing program, about 0.025 seconds of CPU time are needed to type one screenful of text. Emacs averages about 0.004 CPU seconds per keystroke (with one call on the redisplay per keystroke). Although in the interests of efficency we have stripped down algorithm 5 to algorithm 6 the result is still an algorithm which has a firm theoretical basis and which is superior to the usual ad-hoc approach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming

lizknope 6y ago

Emacs has a long history with so many versions and editors with "emacs" in the name but not necessarily what we think of emacs today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs In the 1970's there was TECO and then E. Emacs kind of grew out of these editors. James Gosling of Java fame had his own Gosling Emacs version that I believe was sold for money GNU Emacs only started in 1984 and had its initial release in 1985. This interview is from 1984 so we would need to know what version of Emacs is Bill Joy referring to specifically. Also before fast internet connections the FSF used to sell GNU tools on tape and then CD This newsletter from 1994 says the CD costs $400. I don't know what the price was in 1984 but maybe Bill Joy is referring to that but the Free Software Foundation was only founded in 1985. https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull16.html#SEC38 https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull16.html#SEC38

rjsw 6y ago
From memory, a GNU tape cost me $200 in 1986.

badsectoracula 6y ago

In addition to what lizknope wrote, there are still some commercial Emacs-like editors, perhaps most notable being Epsilon by Lugaru Software: https://www.lugaru.com/ https://www.lugaru.com/ Epsilon was initially released in 1984 for PC/DOS and is still under development.