In 1979 I needed a terminal, so I wired-in a UART to my homebrew Z-80 system and hooked it up to a Cat acoustic (300 baud) modem. I wanted to use Emacs on my g

In 1979 I needed a terminal, so I wired-in a UART to my homebrew Z-80 system and hooked it up to a Cat acoustic (300 baud) modem. I wanted to use Emacs on my guest account on the MIT PDP-10s to do my editing of school projects, so I could FTP and compile them on NBS-10's Pascal compiler, print out the results in the machine room at NBS, drive 20 miles, and hand in the work. Rather than use punchcards. /Now/ you understand. Anything but that. To make Emacs usable at 300 baud, I wrote a SUPDUP terminal emulator. SUPDUP was an abstract terminal type that MIT Emacs understood internally. It sported character and line insert/delete, and region scrolling, and it made the screen update tolerable. It's hard to convey the electric sense of an editor that self-inserted characters. The productivity boost was amazing. It was worth all the effort, and I'm sure I was having a lot more fun than the other poor sots at the U who were having to line up for keypunch machines and deal with two-hour job turnarounds.