The MIT AI Lab itself never found its way to that new world. There’s a reason the Emacs text editor is the only software artifact of that culture that survives

The MIT AI Lab itself never found its way to that new world. There’s a reason the Emacs text editor is the only software artifact of that culture that survives to us, and it had to be rewritten from the ground up on the way. It didn't come from MIT, but TeX is certainly an artifact of the same academic hacker culture. Knuth originally wrote it at SAIL to run on the local OS, WAITS. It was rewritten in Pascal, not C, to be portable to the wide range of operating systems out there in 1980. (I understand that GNU info is also a reimplementation of MIT AI Lab software, which explains a lot.)