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I really dislike the term invent when applied to creating software. Emacs was never invented, it was written (or if you prefer, coded). Text editors were invent

I really dislike the term invent when applied to creating software. Emacs was never invented, it was written (or if you prefer, coded). Text editors were invented long before Emacs. Just iterating and improving on a concept doesn't make you inventor.

bostonpete 13y ago
People's thinking about some of these things (questions of terminology, etc.) was still evolving 30 years ago. I'd be interested to see if he still refers to himself as the inventor of EMACS. At the time he me have considered it an alternative way of saying "author" or "creator".
ajross 13y ago
To be fair: "text editors" really hadn't been invented "long before emacs". At the time (the early 1970's) editing text was a subject of much research and experimentation. Differing paradigms were being tried on new and exciting hardware (the glass tty). Screen editors, as they came to be known, were a brand new curiosity -- they were equally disruptive (if not more so) as the "web application" or "capacitive touchscreen interface" would be decades later. And emacs was one of the very first screen editors. It invented lots of the stuff that would later seem "obvious". So no: I think it's entirely appropriate to say that emacs was "invented" in the same way the browser was.
- tesseractive 13y ago
  It's before my time, but my impression was that both TECO and EMACS originated as teletype line editors (as with ed and ex, the direct predecessors to vi), and were only later adapted to fancy new screen terminals. Am I mistaken?
  - ajross 13y ago
    I likewise was never a user. But the EMACS package of TECO macros was intended specifically to enable screen editting on terminals as I understand it (though surely there was overlap). Basically EMACS:TECO as vi:ex.
georgemcbay 13y ago
"Just iterating and improving on a concept doesn't make you inventor." Using this criteria, who would you name as inventors? I can't think of a single one!
- dllthomas 13y ago
  It doesn't make you inventor of the concept; it makes you inventor of the improvement.

bostonpete 13y ago

People's thinking about some of these things (questions of terminology, etc.) was still evolving 30 years ago. I'd be interested to see if he still refers to himself as the inventor of EMACS. At the time he me have considered it an alternative way of saying "author" or "creator".

ajross 13y ago

To be fair: "text editors" really hadn't been invented "long before emacs". At the time (the early 1970's) editing text was a subject of much research and experimentation. Differing paradigms were being tried on new and exciting hardware (the glass tty). Screen editors, as they came to be known, were a brand new curiosity -- they were equally disruptive (if not more so) as the "web application" or "capacitive touchscreen interface" would be decades later. And emacs was one of the very first screen editors. It invented lots of the stuff that would later seem "obvious". So no: I think it's entirely appropriate to say that emacs was "invented" in the same way the browser was.

tesseractive 13y ago
It's before my time, but my impression was that both TECO and EMACS originated as teletype line editors (as with ed and ex, the direct predecessors to vi), and were only later adapted to fancy new screen terminals. Am I mistaken?
- ajross 13y ago
  I likewise was never a user. But the EMACS package of TECO macros was intended specifically to enable screen editting on terminals as I understand it (though surely there was overlap). Basically EMACS:TECO as vi:ex.

georgemcbay 13y ago

"Just iterating and improving on a concept doesn't make you inventor." Using this criteria, who would you name as inventors? I can't think of a single one!

dllthomas 13y ago
It doesn't make you inventor of the concept; it makes you inventor of the improvement.