> Emacs' problem, then and now, was non-existent, then terrible DOS and Windows support. I don't know when GNU Emacs first became available under DOS. If you l

> Emacs' problem, then and now, was non-existent, then terrible DOS and Windows support. I don't know when GNU Emacs first became available under DOS. If you look at the GNU Emacs 18.59 source distribution (October 1992), while it doesn't support DOS/Windows, its FAQ mentions a DJGPP-based port to 32-bit machines called Demacs (which wasn't pure GNU Emacs, it was actually based on the Nemacs fork which added improved Japanese language support). The many limitations of MS-DOS (8.3 file names, no multitasking) meant that it was essentially impossible for GNU Emacs under MS-DOS to work as well as it did on more capable platforms. Windows 3.x/9x/Me laboured under many of the same limitations – 9x/Me didn't have a 32-bit command line environment, all it had was DOS boxes and COMMAND.COM, plus some horrible kludge by which 32-bit console applications would have their I/O routed through a DOS process (CONAGENT.EXE) via a VxD. While NT-based Windows fixes many of those problems, it doesn't fix all of them – for example, until relatively recently (some Windows 10 build), Windows had no pseudoterminals (except for various flaky unofficial workarounds), which put big limitations on Emacs support for subprocesses compared to other platforms. Now at last it does, but I'm not sure if GNU Emacs has been updated to support them.