More on Multics Emacs

Back in January, I wrote about Bernard Greenberg’s history of Emacs on the Multics system. I just found a set of contemporaneous notes on the first 110 days of Multics Emacs’ development.

What’s amazing is how quickly they were able to get a basic editor framework up and working. As I mentioned in my first post, the Multics system presented some formidable challenges for a full screen editor. Chief among these was that there was no way to do character I/O so the OS itself had to be patched just to get in the game. Achieving a working Emacs was much more complicated than just writing an editor.

After only 110 days, they had an Emacs that was usable as a working editor. Read Greenberg’s notes to get a feel for what a remarkable feat this was. Multics no longer exists—except as a hobbyist project running on a simulator¹—so in a way Multics Emacs no longer matters but its enduring legacy is being the first Emacs to be written in Lisp.

If after reading these (fairly short) notes you’d like more information, see Greenberg’s longer history of Multics Emacs. It adds context and details to many of the points in the short notes.

UPDATE [2019-05-29 Wed 11:12]: Lars Brinkhoff comments and also wrote to me out-of-band that, in fact, EINE was the first Emacs to be written in Lisp. Brinkhoff, whom I’ve written about before, maintains a really great repository of old Emacs code. It’s worth taking a look at if you haven’t already.