[multicians] Emacs humor

This is a funny cartoon and subsequent discussion thread from the Multics discussion group about emacs. Names and personal info edited out due to archival by unknown parties of the list and that these folks might not want names and certainly not email addresses archived. Mentioning that not as a criticism, just to explain the format. I also edited the thread back to bottom posting. Original XKCD cartoon link. https://xkcd.com/378/ fact, there is a silly phrase that many emacs users use, when referring to all the obscure key bindings that you get by default with emacs, or can create. It.s called: Emacs was developed at the MIT AI Lab (by Richard Stallman) and initially written in Teco. It was developed on Lisp machines, which sported lots of modification keys on its keyboard. These included Control, Shift, Hyper, Meta, Super (and perhaps more). Naturally, emacs took advantage of some of these . at least those that were available on multiple terminals or could be emulated on lesser terminals. I remember when I worked at MIT LCS (down the hall from MIT AI), we had a key binding on our Lisp Machines that called the elevator to the 8th floor. I don.t remember the key binding, but I.m sure it used a few of these modification keys (and probably .e. for .elevator. as the modified key). In any case, the class of these funky key bindings was referred to as Control-Meta-Shift-Cokebottle. that at least someone on this list will correct me! "Top", and that the phrase was therefore Control, Shift, Meta, and Top modifier keys depressed. later, PDP-10), but I wouldn't be surprised if it migrated to the Lisp machines, too The old -6, especially, had added hardware to enable it to control the various robot devices the AI lab played with. Some AI Lab hardware guys gained access to the machinery room on the 10th floor and added some extra relay circuitry to one of the elevator controllers, and it wasn't much of a stretch to run the control wires down to the 9th floor machine room. IIRC it took a few years for whatever company was responsible for maintaining the elevators to discover the unauthorized modification and remove it. On 12/1/2015 11:42 AM, Eric <snip> [multicians] wrote: Top key now. you.re right that it also worked on some other interfaces. I remember getting frustrated when I.d be .ready to leave. (at 2am, or so), and would call the elevator, and then I.d have to fix .one more bug., and by the time I got to the elevator, I actually had to push the boring old button to get the elevator doors to open! :-)