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RE: EMACS, 1976
From: |
Ludwig, Mark |
Subject: |
RE: EMACS, 1976 |
Date: |
Wed, 25 Jul 2012 16:53:34 +0000 |
> From: Peter Davis
> Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2012 8:28 AM
> To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: EMACS, 1976
>
> On 7/25/2012 6:36 AM, Barry Margolin wrote:
> > In article <mailman.5547.1343209085.855.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>,
> > Mark Skilbeck <m@iammark.us> wrote:
> >
> >> Hello, fellow Emacsen (Emacsians?).
> >>
> >> I've been reading RMS's essay, EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable
> >> Display Editor[0], and it's piqued an interest in me; I would like to
> >> view the code that made up the first EMACS release in 1976. Have it
> >> any of you lads and lasses, or know where it I may find?
> >
> > I googled for "teco emacs" and found this:
> >
> > http://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/mit_emacs_170_teco_1220/index.html
> >
> > Good luck understanding TECO.
> >
>
> I must still have some TECO reference cards around somewhere. I remember
> writing whole applications as TECO macros. Fun.
Yeah, I started hacking EMACS on a DECsystem-2060 (a.k.a. "Twenex") circa 1980.
I did all my EMACS customization work in Lisp, in the equivalent of would now
be a .el file, and byte-compiled it to a library file that I subsequently
loaded -- just like what we do today.
What I remember having to learn were the TECO display codes. For example, if I
recall correctly (ahem, yes, it really was >30 years ago!), Control-P was the
character to "home up" in the minibuffer (which was three lines tall back
then), meaning move the cursor to the upper-left-most character position. Then
there was another character to delete the remainder of the space which I don't
remember; those two characters appeared frequently in the out-of-the-box EMACS
code, because any prompting function had to do that in order for its prompt to
appear cleanly and consistently.
Oh, and at the time, I liked to "sign" my e-mail messages with "$$" at the end.
What will not be clear by just looking at a printed representation of TECO is
that the dollar sign ("$") is how an ESCape character appears; ESCape-ESCape
was the statement terminator, and interactively meant "execute the preceding
code."$$
- Re: EMACS, 1976, (continued)
- Re: EMACS, 1976, Peter Dyballa, 2012/07/25
- Re: EMACS, 1976, Mark Skilbeck, 2012/07/25
- Re: EMACS, 1976, François Allisson, 2012/07/26
- Re: EMACS, 1976, Barry Margolin, 2012/07/25