Re: line-move-visual

[Mark Crispin]

On Sat, 5 Jun 2010, Xah Lee posted:
> am curious, if you know Daniel Weinreb, and who used emacs first.
> Daniel wrote: "Nobody has been using Emacs longer than I have (I was
> one of the original beta-testers.  I refer here to the original Emacs,
> written in ITS TECO for the DEC 10.) "

DLW was there, and was quite a bit closer to the thick of things than I 
was.  I had returned to complete my undergraduate education in another 
state a few months before.

In reading his quote, DLW does not claim to be "the first"; he simply 
says that nobody has used it longer than he has.

There was no single person who was "first".  I can think of at least a 
half dozen individuals without trying who would share the spot with him. 
The actual number is probably at least twice that.

I started using emacs within a couple of days of DLW.  I knew of the 
project (it had started the previous summer).  When I started noticing (I 
was remote via ARPAnet on a 300 bps dialup) that people were running "E", 
instead of what they were running before, I put two and two together at 
once and joined the fun.

This would have been December 1976 - January 1977.

emacs was barely usable then, with frequent crashes, but it improved very 
quickly.  It was also somewhat difficult to use, as I did not have a 
cursor-addressed display terminal (yes, it was possible to use it in 
"glass teletype" mode).  It may have been a couple of months after that 
before I finally was able to try emacs in full display mode.

I know that by the spring of 1977 I had access to an ADM-3A which had 
cursor addressing...but very little else good to say about it as a display 
terminal.  I wrote a term paper using emacs on it, at 300 baud.  Today, 
such torture would probably be banned by UN treaty.

I used the predecessors of emacs for at least a year before DLW arrived. 
My macro library, with its symmetry between control and meta that emacs 
copied, was an extension of the TECMAC library.  TECMAC and another 
library called TMACS were the two main streams that became emacs.

Most of emacs' fundamental key bindings came from TECMAC, but there were 
significant differences.  For example, TECMAC used C-Y C-Y for what in 
emacs was first C-X C-R and later became C-X C-F.  TMACS' influence was 
especially felt in the M-X commands.  emacs fused these.

The fundamental behaviors of C-A, C-E, C-N, and C-P were all in TECMAC. 
Now that I think about it, I think that they were in ^R mode in TECO 
before that.  They're very old behaviors.

I'm not certain now - DLW will definitely correct me if I am wrong - but I 
am pretty sure that DLW wrote the first clone of emacs.  It was on the 
Lisp Machine, written in Lisp Machine LISP (a superset of MacLISP; Common 
LISP didn't exist yet) and was called EINE (Eine Is Not Emacs).  Its 
successor was ZWEI.

DLW is a good guy and a very bright programmer.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.