Over at the MIT Technology Review there’s a nice article on Emacs turning 50 this year. It gives a short history of Emacs starting from its TECO days. Most of that history is pretty well known to seasoned Emacs users but it’s still interesting.
What the article doesn’t give is the exact day of Emacs’ 50th birthday. That’s not surprising. The early history of Emacs involved the researchers at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory agreeing on a standard set of TECO macros in order to improve collaboration. That was undoubtedly an ongoing process that didn’t have a well defined beginning or end so it’s easy to understand why the exact birthday of Emacs is a little murky.
Regardless, we can all celebrate Emacs’ 50th year. It’s remarkable when you think about it. Very few programs last that long. There’s FORTRAN and Lisp, of course, but I can’t think of any other piece of software with that sort of longevity. There is, to be sure, a Ship of Theseus aspect to that longevity but it’s one shared by FORTRAN and Lisp as well.
Who knows what things will look like in another 50 years but if we still have editors, I’m putting my money on Emacs still being around. Wouldn’t that be something?