[multicians] Emacs humor

From: Johnny Billquist Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2015 5:44 PM Thanks for chiming in, Johnny! Keeps me from having to do it. :-) Well, technically, the original TECO was developed on the PDP-1 at MIT, taken up by DEC, and ported to most of their subsequent systems. The version of TECO in which EMACS was developed was an MIT-AI Lab local creation with no DEC input, for ITS; that version of TECO, and therefore EMACS, was ported to TENEX and TOPS-20. The history of "bucky bits" goes back even further than most people know. Before the PDP-6 came into existence, SAIL ran a computer-assisted lab using a PDP-1 with specially modified terminals. These were designed by a Swiss computer scientist later known for creating a paedogogical Algol derivative, a gentleman whom the SAIL graduate students did not like and called (referring to a malocclusion) "Bucky Beaver".[1] The extra 2 bits on the terminals became "bucky bits". With the PDP-6 came a design for special terminals which included not 2 but 5 bucky bits (though 2 were unnamed on the Stanford keyboard), in a 14-bit character set[2] where Control was the 200 bit, Meta was the 400 bit, and Top was the 4000 bit. Top referred to non-Latin characters on the keys, above the usual typewriter characters we all know and love. Internally, Top+character was translated to a value in the range 0-37, which were graphical rather than ASCII control characters. I used to use one of these terminals from time to time, to read mailing lists hosted on SU-AI (AKA Sail.Stanford.EDU in a more modern era), and to SUPDUP to my account on MIT-AI, where I could use EMACS with real bucky bits just as $DEITY intended. Up next here is to modify a terminal emulation program to provide SUPDUP and the Stanford character set in order to talk to our WAITS[3] system on the net. Rich [1] The name of an animated spokescreature for Ipana toothpaste. [2] Hey, if RMS can do that in the EMACS manual... [3] The OS, descended from the PDP-6 monitor and thus related to Tops-10 which SAIL ran on the PDP-6, the PDP-10/PDP-6 dual processor, the KL-10/PDP-10/PDP-6 triprocessor, and KL-10/PDP-10 dual processor and the KL-10 uniprocessor between 1964 and 1990. Also ran on a Foonly at CCRMA and a KL-10 at Lawrence Livermore Labs, but retired earlier. Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer Living Computer Museum 2245 1st Avenue S Seattle, WA 98134 mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/