2 Dec
2014
2 Dec
'14
1:38 p.m.
From: Noel Chiappa
Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2014 11:03 AM
> From: Rich Alderson
> The first non-PDP-10 port was written in MACLISP
for Multics--a 36-bit
> architecture!--by Bernie Greenberg
Depends on what you define as 'EMACS'... :-)
The PDP-11 TECO with real-time
display mode which I was talking about earlier had, when in real-time mode, a
command on every single control character, most of them the same as EMACS.
(E.g. typing ^U^K would kill 4 lines, from the point onward.) And you could
write custom code for it. (In TECO, no less!) But it didn't have the rich
command set of EMACS (although as of that date, EMACS was still in a bit of
flux - many people still had their own private macros/command sets - MOON's
was famously different).
According to:
(which is a very nice, complete, history of Multics
Emacs, BTW), Multics Emacs
didn't run until March, 1978; the PDP-11 real-time display TECO was running
well before that. (We all used ITS some, for ARPANET email, etc, so we wanted
the same kind of powerful editing tool.)
Not that it really matters any more - just trying to
be historically accurate!
Thank you. I appreciate the correction. I admit to a bias towards the PDP-10
and other big iron in my own career, so I bow to one who was there!
I used Multics Emacs when I was given the project of putting the University of
Chicago on an MMDF-based phone network sponsored by EDUCOM and called EDUnet.
MIT-MULTICS was the hub for the system, so I had an account there and was very
happy to find my favorite editor available. That was 1983-84, after which I
moved to Stanford. The rest, as they say, is boring old stuff^W^W^Whistory.
Rich
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/