Re: Most used words in current buffer

[Bob Newell]

> How was it to use the Emacs on Prime OS?  Was it very different to
> other
> Emacsen extant at the time?

I also date back to these days, and in fact Emacs on Prime was
my first experience with Emacs, all those years ago. I was
fairly active in the Prime user community and sent the odd
patch back to Prime once in a while. I was thoroughly disliked
by the local Prime software support staff because the only
time I ever contacted them was when something was seriously
wrong and I couldn't fix it on my own.

The initial release, as I recall, was extremely slow starting,
taking at least five minutes before being ready for use (not
exaggerating). This did get much, much better with subsequent
releases. And, once started, it always ran very quickly.

It was real Emacs in all its glory. Nick--- as you're the one
that did the port--- take credit for brilliant work.

There were a couple of peculiarities. Ctrl-p was Prime's
interrupt, so previous-line became Ctrl-z (I don't believe
there was the concept of 'suspend' at that time). We used the
mnemoic 'zrevious'! The other odd thing was that underscore
was used instead of dash, so you wouldn't have buffer-name,
you'd have buffer_name.

But it served me well for a number of years, and that's how I
learned Emacs and Elisp. There wasn't a package library, but
Emacs was still super-powerful. When the PC came along I
looked for something as good and found little. Early Emacs
ports to the PC weren't the best. There was something called
Epsilon (which I think still exists) that came closest. But
eventually there was the Real Thing and none of us ever looked
back. By then Prime was in its last days.

-- 
Bob Newell
Honolulu, Hawai`i
* Via Gnus/BBDB/Org/Emacs/Linux *