A History of Emacs


A History of Emacs
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   XEmacs is a powerful, customizable text editor and development
environment.  It began as Lucid Emacs, which was in turn derived from
GNU Emacs, a program written by Richard Stallman of the Free Software
Foundation.  GNU Emacs dates back to the 1970's, and was modelled after
a package called "Emacs", written in 1976, that was a set of macros on
top of TECO, an old, old text editor written at MIT on the DEC PDP 10
under one of the earliest time-sharing operating systems, ITS
(Incompatible Timesharing System). (ITS dates back well before Unix.)
ITS, TECO, and Emacs were products of a group of people at MIT who
called themselves "hackers", who shared an idealistic belief system
about the free exchange of information and were fanatical in their
devotion to and time spent with computers. (The hacker subculture dates
back to the late 1950's at MIT and is described in detail in Steven
Levy's book `Hackers'.  This book also includes a lot of information
about Stallman himself and the development of Lisp, a programming
language developed at MIT that underlies Emacs.)
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