RE: launch a program in an arbitrary frame

[Drew Adams]

> > 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.
> 
> Remember, there was a time it was considered impressive to PC users to
> have memory measured in megabytes...any number of megabytes.  Even one
> megabyte could be seen as a lot.
> 80's workstations would have several meg...but is that really a lot if
> you're going to run a serious Emacs session with lots of buffers?

Whatever they had was more than enough for running Emacs, in my
experience.  Whether Sun, SGI, or another brand.  Other applications
could sometimes tax a workstation, but not Emacs.  (Of course, you
could use Emacs, or any other program, to do heavy enough work to
bring any system to a crawl.)

> Keep in mind, the whole point of Emacs is...

It wasn't a problem.  At all.  Do you remember it being a problem
to use Emacs on a workstation, or are you just repeating something
you heard?  So far, you've said that workstations were limited in
resources and Emacs was/is a memory hog.  Do you actually remember
having a problem using Emacs on a workstation in the 80s?  It would
be interesting to hear from others too about this.

> Since it sounds like you were on UNIX machines that early, you
> may also remember that when X came around, some people considered
> that a luxury, since that took a lot of system memory too, even
> on machines that had a framebuffer and were made for it.  A
> lot of people just prefered to do without it.

For the most part, we did use X when it came out.  Yes, it was
a monster, but many people found it worth it.  The question here
is about Emacs, however.  Emacs is not X Window - far from it.

> Not only was Emacs considered a hog by some people at that time,
> but later in the early 90's

That's not my recollection.  Except by comparison with editors
like `vi'.  I don't recall Emacs ever slowing anyone down.

Remember, you could (and still can) use Emacs in terminal mode,
which alone can make a big difference if your context is limited.
But when graphic Emacs became available I used it most of the
time, and I do not recall any performance problems with it.

> some people even felt that way about the then-new bash shell.

X Window and bash are not Emacs.