Comment by gumby
8 hours ago
Hah, is this a troll? It’s a lot older than those editors.
EMACS started as Eugene Ciccareli’ init file for the TECO editor (which was also a programming language) around 1976. Hence the name (Eugene‘s Macros). It was later rewritten in Lisp for Multics, the MIT Lisp Machine (I worked on one for the Xerox lisp machine as well), and later Unix (in those cases using lisp only as an extension language)
Yea I couldn’t resist. I’m actually a huge fan of eMacs although I only only tried it once. I’m not a programmer, just scripts here and there in random attempts with varying success. Thank you for the history tidbit! That is really cool. I love hearing stories about punch card programs and Lisp and any forgotten or slightly forgotten technology for that matter
> Hence the name (Eugene‘s Macros)
Interesting, do you have a source for this? I’ve always read that it stood for Editor MACros, are you saying this is a backronym?
Doesn't seem true, the Wikipedia page for Emacs only mentions Eugene once as one of the early contributors, not as the creator. The original TECO macros were made by Guy L Steele Jr.
Not just. It has the origin as well:
"The new version of TECO quickly became popular at the AI Lab and soon accumulated a large collection of custom macros whose names often ended in MAC or MACS, which stood for macro. Two years later, Guy Steele took on the project of unifying the diverse macros into a single set.[21] Steele and Stallman's finished implementation included facilities for extending and documenting the new macro set.[3] The resulting system was called EMACS, which stood for Editing MACroS or, alternatively, Emacs with MACroS."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs
There was a lot of swapping of what was in other peoples’ inits (there was no security on ITS at all). I discovered that others just linked to my (compiled) init file due to people complaining when I changed it.
Since Wikipedia didn’t even exist until emacs was more than 25 years old and little was written down in a way acceptable to Wikipedia, consider pages on topics of that vintage to be vague
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