RE: launch a program in an arbitrary frame

[Drew Adams]

> Generally, I just meant that I remember in the 1980's and 90's, people
> used to joke about Emacs being enormous.  On 80's workstations, it might
> take all the memory in your machine just to run an Emacs session.

Do you remember Emacs being a memory hog back then, or do you just
remember hearing someone joke about it that way?

FWIW, I used Emacs heavily back then, on Unix workstations, Lisp
machines, and terminals (UNIX, VAX/VMS).  I never found it to be
a memory hog or sluggish or bloated.  Clearly, Emacs was smaller
back then too, but I've never noticed it being particularly slow.

Certainly, no one I knew ever had the impression that it "might
take all the memory in your machine just to run an Emacs session."
My recollection tells me that's a wild fairy tale.  Early PCs were
limited (and didn't run Emacs), but not workstations.

I even used Emacs sometimes on a very limited baud stream over a
phone line, where you often had to fiddle with `C-l' (to refresh,
slowly, top to bottom - like watching a Surveyor image arrive from
an early moon landing) and scroll locking.  In that context, yes,
the slow response could be a pain, but that was the wire, not Emacs
- anything "interactive" over such a wire was slow.

Of course, for someone used to `vi' and starting up the editor
each time even to change only a few chars, Emacs was, and is,
slow to start and use, by comparison.  But such comparisons have
always been essentially apples-to-oranges.