Fwd: is there any word processing software for the pdp11?

[Rich Alderson]

From: Jon Elson
Sent: Monday, December 01, 2014 9:31 AM

> Of COURSE, emacs was available on many PDP-11 OS's.  Maybe not from
> DEC, but most certainly on the DECUS tapes, there were all sorts of
> variants, updates, extensions, and so on.  Certainly available for
> RSX, and probably needs a good deal of memory.  Not so sure on some
> of the other OS's.

EMACS was not available from DEC on any architecture, unless by
accident.  It was written in the MIT AI Lab's version of PDP-10 TECO,
which was ported to TENEX and TOPS-20 (i. e., "Twenex") at the Lab,
but not to any other architecture in that form:  The first non-PDP-10
port was written in MACLISP for Multics--a 36-bit architecture!--by
Bernie Greenberg, which gave lots of people ideas about how to port
something like EMACS to other architectures, including Lisp machines.

Yes, there were many EMACS-inspired editors for non-PDP-10 systems,
but not from DEC.

NB:  I am still the official maintainer of PDP-10 TECO and EMACS, ever
since I posted a Y2K fix for Kent Pitman's TIME library to comp.emacs
and the GNU bug groups.  At least, that's what RMS said at the time.

                                                                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/