Mastodawn

I'm not sure what part is surprising here. Definitely Emacs arose on top of TECO via Control-R mode as described. I guess people are surprised there was something before emacs-lisp?

There was one semester of Sussman's course in between the old 6.031 and the revised 6.001 where they had been on an 11/45 and wanted to move to the 10, and I packaged up a thing called MinEmacs (a mini-emacs) that was not extensible and just had a basic set of commands I thought would keep people from getting confused.

Stallman did NOT like my packaging. He said that Emacs was not about the command set and that it could have vi's command set for all he cared, but that it was about extensibility [edit: i should've said customizability here, though both, the ability of users to program it, in other words. Sorry I have no quote.], and that I should not use reference to Emacs for what I did. I had been worried that some region commands were a bit surprising because Emacs did not visibly display the region and it was often baffling what happened to the region. He wrote a library called Novice that he said was the right way to do this. With it loaded, when you did one of the worrisome commands (which were still disabled by default) it would ask you if you knew what you were doing and wanted to turn the command on. This behavior became a standard part of emacs when the port was done to emacs-lisp, so there is no novice library now. But at the time it was a separately loadable thing.

I tell the story mainly because it gives a sense of what the identifying characteristic was of Lisp as I understood it based on his strong reaction to what I'd done.

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Dave Fischer Mar 23

@kentpitman @tomjennings Hunh. Were there other mini-emacs's before microemacs?

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Kent Pitman Mar 23

@davefischer @tomjennings

Dunno.

My editor mostly curtailed extension. not sure it it was smaller. Don't recall exactly how I built it. I'm not trying to compete for a place in history with the reimplementation crowd. I just feel like there WAS a lot of cool work at risk of not being recorded. People wrote papers on certain things, but they were encouraged to delete other things because diskspace was always at a premium.

So I feel like there was competition with emacs that I don't see represented in that summary page.

People wrote macro packages. Emacs was a particular set of macros, My impression as i arrived on scene was thst TECMAC was competing with EMACS, each of which packaged such macros.

I would at least like to see related work like that represented in such writeups, because just like with backquote/quasiquote in Lisp, there was a soup of ideas that a lot of people had implemented before something was finally standardized, and what later seemed like an invention was really more of a competition, not even competitive, just people getting work fone differently. Even bundling things into traded libraries was an evolving notion.

EMACS was part of a soup of parallel efforts that got whittled down because managing your own was a pain, and for some it meant more trading away their own ideas for someone else's just to get out from under maintenance burden.

Some people just had large libraries that got added on to one or another of these. Like Dave Moon's lunar library. There were two different TECO compilers, really compressors. They disagreed over whether to compress out the spaces or to require you to use underscores that would get replaced by spaces a similar problem exists today with verbose mode and regular expressions if you're looking to understand thaf problem.

Control-r mode in TECO, the idea of associating a sequence of editor commands with each keystroke, seem to me the real innovation. What I recall from the time, so I can't say for sure, was that it was Steele's suggestion and Stallman's implementation. I don't know if that was right but that was what I was told.

1/2 (this message ran long, and sorry for typos which maybe I'll fix later, but I'm in a hurry today and doing a lot of voice dictation of terms that are not transcribing well)

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Kent Pitman

@davefischer @tomjennings

People fuss a lot about the credit, but my point is that good work arises from smart people conversing and interesting ways. In fact, a lot of patents, even though patent means heavily on who submitted an idea first, are probably the consequence of discussion in labs between smart people, where the right person doesn't always get the credit.

There is a lot of revisiting, for example, of smart ideas by women that nearby men took credit for in terms of historical contributions in a variety of fields. And while we're obsessed about the history of things, I worry more about people coming to believe that what we need to survive and thrive is smart people to have brilliantly unique ideas, but I think we need vibrant ecosystems of discussions that make such ideas inevitable and get them quickly honed.

When you strip away all the plagiarism and copyright violation and enriching of individuals for taking credit for what they did not individually do, and if you didn't have an economic system of winner take all, but UBI and a commitment to all benefit together, then LLMs might be seen as a societal consensus tool. But there is, instead, more fascination with who them with what, to take credit, to profit, to make others feel bad for not having seen something first or pursued something fast enough. That whole culture disturbs me.

Back to editors, Earl Killian might be a better resource. Maybe others who worked for Steve Orszag at MIT's math department. They (I worked in that group but did not make any of its fabulous infrastructure) had a PDP 11/05 running a hacked OS (maybe trantor?) that supported four people under time sharing editing code that would be a virtual card deck to submit over phone lines to NCAR's cdc 7600. I'm nearly certain that timesharing was not a standard property of operating systems on the pdp-11/05, and that someone had done something very specific and heroic for this instance at the math dept to make it work. I think they had a small emacs-like thing, maybe not extensible, that we used to edit things. The cspability they had crammed into such a tiny machine was astounding.

I feel as if it had some clever name too like MINE (not the pronoun, but like mine is not emacs). But memory could be playing tricks on me here. I was still in awe because this was 1977 in the summer and I was just getting used to MIT at all and not yet really having a good understanding of what was around me.

And I would want to see the timeline of tint ,(tint is not teco) and sine (sine is not emacs) from MITs architecture machine group alongside these other small emacs efforts to really know.

I was more surprised by the small number of examples in the article cited, in other words. I'm not too sure about any of these recollections, but what I am sure about is there was a lot going on by a lot of people trying to impress one another and play on each other's ideas and joke and buold cool things. It has all become so very important anymore, but at the time it was important more like sport than like business. There was not yet any business. It was just fun, and it made people laugh, and we had the consciousness to know we were building things that might matter in the future and that we're going into very cool directions and that we were privileged to have any funding for and that we needed to make good on all of that privilege to show people what could be done with all of these brewing ideas.

I think it was Minsky that said somehow (not a quote) that humor is how we socialize ideas on the fringe of what we know. A way of communicating puzzles and dangers and questions. That's why I keep re-emphasizing jokes and humor in all of this, and trying to impress our friends. Becayse there was not yet really a community based on money. There was for the hardware, but it's use was uncertain. For the software, the economy was more one of sharing and getting people to use ideas and try ideas and build on ideas.

And the whole idea of things like free software works better if the money to pay for food comes from somewhere else. In a college it comes from parents, scholarships, summer jobs. Or it did. Nowadays from lifelong debt. We're building a society capable of doing everything automatically and still insisting that people work their fingers to the bone. Something deeply wrong with that.

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