Re: Oldest running Emacs version

[Barry Margolin]

In article <mailman.5607.1052174541.21513.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>,
Niels Freimann  <nfreimann@firemail.de> wrote:
>On Monday 05 May 2003 21:53, Barry Margolin wrote:
>> ITS/TOPS-20 EMACS is customized in TECO, not Lisp
>
>I already mentioned that in my first message. *emacs* isn't 
>ITS/TOPS-20 emacs, but Bernies Multics emacs, and the 
>machine with the *running its" in real is a PC or something 
>running an pdp-10 emulator. 

Since Multics Emacs ran on Multics, and was never ported to any other OS, I
really doubt that this is what you're seeing.  It's almost certainly ITS
EMACS, which runs on PDP-10/20 machines running ITS or TOPS-20.  ITS EMACS
is the grand-daddy of all Emacs and Emacs-like editors.  They all share the
same basic commands (e.g. the ones you learn in the tutorial), as well as
the overall UI philosophy (buffers, major and minor modes, etc.), but
diverge when you start looking at the less commonly used features (like
they all have Dired, but differ in the commands that are available within
it).

This is mostly just due to normal evolutionary processes.  Development of
ITS EMACS and Multics Emacs stopped in the early 80's.  GNU Emacs was born
around that time, with most of the features that the predecessors had, and
has since had hundreds of developers adding things to it.  Throughout all
of this it has still retained much of the core; a time traveler coming from
1980 would have little difficulty using GNU Emacs.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barry.margolin@level3.com
Genuity Managed Services, a Level(3) Company, Woburn, MA
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