Source and compiling instructions for old version of Emacs (< 19.x)

[Earl Kent]

Hi,

I'm working on some research projects on the history of text editor 
technologies and more generally the early days of the free software 
movement.  As part of that research I would like to compile, on a 
contemporary Linux distribution, runnable, early versions of the code, 
say circa `88.  I've looked all over the Internet the only early version 
of emacs I can find is of 18.59, which is already 1992.

Does anyone know of earlier versions and have 
instructions/scripts/patches for compiling it for Linux?  (Even early 
versions of 19.x took a lot of hacking for me to get up and running and 
I still can't 18.59 to run without seg-fault on startup.)

Editorial:  the initial releases of the GNU system, written largely by 
Stallman, stand as one of the great intellectual accomplishments of the 
20th century, not just of hackerdom, but really across all human 
endeavors.  Not having compilable, runnable versions of them, or even 
the source code, makes them in some sense lost works, even as their 
derived works, current Emacs, and inspired works, all modern editors, 
flourish.  On aspect of my research is to set up a project to keep these 
things runnable on latest versions of Linux with as little patching as 
possible.

Thanks for any help ore pointers to others who have worked on this!

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