Kent PitmanMar 23

@tomjennings

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.

Show threadDave FischerMar 23
@kentpitman @tomjennings Hunh. Were there other mini-emacs's before microemacs?
Show threadKent PitmanMar 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)

Show threadCraig BrozefskyMar 28

@kentpitman @tomjennings @davefischer
> 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.

This makes me curious what was the cause of the maintenance work? OS
churn? Porting to new hardware? New file formats? Evolution of
the underlying programs and tools that they invoked?

Show threadtom jenningsMar 28

@craigbro

I was not part of those worlds so cant comment specifically.

But before integrated cpu chips every computer was an utterly different instruction set, different system, different arithemetic model, different io and certainly, different and incompatible languages and compilers.

As late as the DOS era C compilers varied widely, and not source level compatible. Open source as people know it today didnt exist because it couldn't. (Though User Groups sharing tapes -- within a manufacturer eg DECUS -- goes back to the dawn.)

Very often moving any significant program from computer A to computer B was as hard or harder than anything to day, even for a relatively modest text editor. The sheer diversity is hard to imagine today.

@kentpitman @davefischer

Show threadKent Pitman

@tomjennings @craigbro @davefischer

This is going to go into a lot of personal opinion that I cannot back in any objective way. I'm just exposing my own thoughts.

I mostly agree with this, and surely there were a lot of site conditionals. And note I call them site conditionals and not architecture conditionals, because exactly as you say, they seemed so specific to a particular machine. Even the four PDP-10's running ITS were slightly different model numbers. They knew about each other and could cross-call each other under some circumstances over the chaosnet (effectively what is now the ethernet) but theit identity mattered. Maclisp was distributed among these, but also made to work for TOPS-20, which was very similar to the PDP-10. ITS TECO was similarly made available in those environments. Early prototypes of what was eventually free software. I think the term copyleft predates, though I didn't check. The term all rights (or writes, I don't recall) reversed being a joke on All rights reserved. But there was no financial advantage to selling such software. No real market for somebody to buy it. So it was shared because kind of why not? It was not yet a market economy. Money came from elsewhere.

And capitalists like to tell themselves that they are special in some way, that they are driven, where ordinary people are lazy. Or that only smart people will do good things if not forced to participate in markets. But I'm not so sure. I think when you free people from having to chase money for food, they get excited and creative because they have the freedom to stop and think without worrying about starving, to have fun without being criticized for not doing something useful, as if having fun was not useful. And I think that would happen to more than just this crew of people.

I don't think the enabling thing was just at these people were smart. I think it's that they had the freedom to explore. Market economies are based on scarcity being valuable, but this economy was not based on that and so it didn't have to hoard software, it could share it.

I'm not really opposed to free software. There are many places it's done good things. But the concept is dissonant with our economic system which intends you to hoard something, to make it uniquely yours, that you can extort value from others. It's worth stopping and thinking whether that's a good model. Many think that that's what free software does, but it does not. Free software forces you to stop and think whether you can afford under a system that wants you to do something completely different to stand up to that system by injuring yourself under its model. That's a much more risky thing and not a risk everyone can take. But not because they don't want to share or they don't understand, just because the current system is harsh and not everyone is up to fighting it.

But what I'm saying is that we're also in charge of that system that's being fought and then in some sense the wrong battleground has been chosen. Free software has some nice ideas in it, but goodness or badness of an idea is sometimes chosen according to context, and even as there's much good that's been done with free software in spite of the obstacles, that same good might be done differently if we had a world based on collaboration that did not require us to care about licenses at all.

Free software is a pragmatic patch to a system, but it carries a kind of technical debt that can only be resolved by fixing the system iself properly.

YMMV

Mar 28 at 7:46pmWeb
Show threadCraig BrozefskyMar 28

@kentpitman @davefischer @tomjennings
> I don't think the enabling thing was just at these people were
> smart. I think it's that they had the freedom to explore. Market
> economies are based on scarcity being valuable, but this economy was
> not based on that and so it didn't have to hoard software, it could
> share it.

See the world, you have built it, with shoulders of iron.
See the world, but it's not yours, say the stealers of Zion.
- The Clash - The Equaliser

My relationship to free software over my 30 years as a developer is founded upon the fact that it is what enabled my career. I didn't go to college, or have a local peer group. Learning linux, and using free tools to build my own workstation, clusters, and eventually, becoming a lisp programmer, would not happen with the generous sharing of others. I was able to share much of my work as open source, because little was actually depending upon the license.

I agree with you, we should not confuse the visible and valorized "capitalist economy" with the entirety of the socio-economic systems that we depend on, build, and flourish within.

Show threadtom jenningsMar 29

@kentpitman

I wholeheartedly agree with you, and have similar criticisms. The free software movement has serious problems, as you say. Its also being used to build the surveillance culture we're living under. Technology is not freedom and technological improvements are not progress.

@craigbro @davefischer