Re: Oldest running Emacs version

[Barry Margolin]

In article <mailman.5614.1052211157.21513.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>,
Niels Freimann  <nfreimann@firemail.de> wrote:
>On Tuesday 06 May 2003 01:08, Barry Margolin wrote:
>
>> t's almost certainly ITS EMACS, which runs on PDP-10/20 machines running ITS 
>> or TOPS-20.  
>
>No, it cant be true. ITS editor macros was written entirely in TECO and 
>not Lisp. It was ported to Tenex and TOPS-20 operating systems by Stallman 
>and McMahon. Therefore  both the ITS and the TOPS-20 emacsens were TECO , 
>and not maclisp (multics) or moclisp (unix), emacsens. What the posters found
>on the pdp-10 emulator was not Richards ITS emacs. ITS was an experimental
>OS of the MIT written by hackers. 

I know, I was there from 1979 to 1983.  The first EMACS I used was ITS
EMACS, then Multics Emacs.  Over the years I've also used Gosling (later
renamed Unipress) Emacs, Zimmerman's Emacs, ZWEI, Epsilon, and TV.

I don't know what you've got, but it's not Multics Emacs.  I was the last
maintainer of Multics Emacs, when I worked for Honeywell Bull until they
cancelled Multics development.  It was never ported to any other system.
It wouldn't have been impossible, but it would have been quite a bit of
work, because it made use of lots of Multics-specific features.

There are a few other Emacs-like editors for PDP-10's.  For instance, Mike
Kazar at CMU wrote FINE.  However, Craig Finseth's FAQ on Emacs
implementations doesn't list any of them that use Lisp as their extension
language.

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