I just ran across a video on the birth of Emacs from last year. It’s by Lars Brinkhoff, Irreal’s go to guy for questions on the history of Emacs. As I’ve written before, he maintains a repository of historical Emacs code all the way back to TECO.
The video is a series of demonstrations of some of that ancient code. It starts with showing what a pain it was to use TECO. It did, however, have a macro language that was fairly capable and Emacs famously began life as a set of macros for TECO. It’s where the name Emacs comes from: Editing MACroS. It was a sort of compilation of the TECO macros that individual users at MIT’s AI labs had written. The idea was that then everyone would be working in the same environment.
Since Emacs was originally written as TECO macros, it wasn’t very portable so it was rewritten in various languages such as LISP and C. The video gives a demonstration of some of those old systems. If nothing else, watching them will show you how good we have it now.
Now, of course, Emacs is synonymous with GNU Emacs, which is available on essentially any platform that matters. Brinkhoff tells a nice story. What began as a way of letting hackers share someone else’s TECO session has blossomed into what many of us consider the world’s best editor. Not everyone agrees with that last assessment but none but the ignorant doubt that it’s certainly a contender.
The video is about 41 and a half minutes long so you’ll need to schedule some time. If you’re interested in old Emacs implementations and how things used to be, take a look at the video.