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Fabio Natali at #37c3's posts Post Back to profile
Fabio Natali at #37c3

I enjoyed this 1979 article on #Emacs by Stallman. I'd read some old papers on Emacs already but what struck me of this one was to see how much Emacs was there already in 1979!

archive.org/details/MITAIMemo5

The extensibility and the fact that the editor documents itself, one'd expect them from the start because they're so foundational. But #Dired was also there already and so was Rmail, a mail client apparently.

I'd be curious to try a very very old Emacs version and see how it feels to someone 45 years from the future. I'm not even sure if such an old version could be built or run these days though?

18 September at 17:10 | Open on octodon.social
11 comments
Panicz Maciej Godek

@fabionatali earlier this year I contacted Bernard Greenberg, who was the central force behind the development of Multics Emacs, and I learned a lot of striking things

functional.cafe/@PaniczGodek/1

18 September at 17:41 | Open on functional.cafe
Panicz Maciej Godek

@fabionatali in either case, if you're into this sort of retro, I think @larsbrinkhoff is the right person to approach

18 September at 17:43 | Open on functional.cafe
Fabio Natali at #37c3

@PaniczGodek

Hi Panicz, thanks. I read the interview, very interesting, thanks for publishing it! And thanks for pointing me to @larsbrinkhoff in the other toot.

19 September at 10:14 | Open on octodon.social
George Jones :emacs: :orgmode:

@PaniczGodek @fabionatali I've used multics emacs. Was any of the conversation in Yiddish or Latin? His source code comments are 🙂

19 September at 17:24 | Open on fosstodon.org
Panicz Maciej Godek

@eludom he did mention being Monteverdi, and referring to David Moon as Luna
@fabionatali

19 September at 18:00 | Open on functional.cafe
djuber

@fabionatali might want to check github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs if you actually want to try, I bet anything before the early nineties will be harder to build on a modern unix.

The patch set for emacs 18 in dev.gentoo.org/~ulm/emacs/ probably has hints needed to port anything much older, 18.59 is from 1992, so already more than a decade after Stallman's report you linked, and somehow more than 30 years old now. It's also the oldest version in ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/emacs/

18 September at 21:29 | Open on fosstodon.org
Lars Brinkhoff

@djuber @fabionatali Here's a presentation where I demo TECO, Emacs from 1976, and some other things. Another time I demoed E (from Stanford), Gosling Emacs, and GNU Emacs 16, but that video is not available yet.
youtube.com/watch?v=xdJtANtJMI

19 September at 6:30 | Open on mastodon.sdf.org
Fabio Natali at #37c3

@larsbrinkhoff

Thanks Lars, I watched the presentation. Fascinating, I really enjoyed it, it gives a lot of context on that early period. :heart: I'd be curious to watch the GNU Emacs 16 demo too, if you get to publish it at some point.

@djuber

19 September at 10:26 | Open on octodon.social
Fabio Natali at #37c3

@djuber

Hi, I watched Lars' presentation on TECO and a couple of very early Emacsen (late 70s and early 80s).

youtube.com/watch?v=xdJtANtJMI

I think that gave me all the context I needed in terms of that period and those early versions. ❤️ I might try a slightly more modern GNU Emacs (from the 90s), following the links you mentioned.

Ty!

19 September at 10:21 | Open on octodon.social
George Jones :emacs: :orgmode:

@fabionatali You can get an account on a TOPS20 (and other) systems @ sdf.org/

A while back, I fired up TECO emacs for the first time in 3 or 4 decades. Oh my. I could edit with all the "standard" emacs control sequences, but today's GNU emacs is a different animal.

19 September at 11:45 | Open on fosstodon.org
Fabio Natali at #37c3

@eludom This is cool, I didn't know, thanks for the link!

19 September at 16:10 | Open on octodon.social
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