[Ilugc] Gosling and Emacs
- From: b.ghose@xxxxxxx (Baishampayan Ghose)
- Date: Mon Oct 30 10:59:42 2006
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On Monday 30 October 2006 09:05 AM, Roshan Mathews cobbled together some
glyphs to say:
In two different pages at Sun, I saw the following in an introduction
to James Gosling:
He has also built a WYSIWYG text editor, a constraint-based drawing
editor and a text editor called "Emacs" for UNIX systems.
Was a shocking at first till I remembered that RMS had used code from
Gosling Emacs in the first versions of GNU Emacs. Gosling was
apparently the first person to write a complete usable Emacs for UNIX.
Puts him up there with Guy Steele and RMS as really prolific coders. :)
True. But in any case, rms was the creator of Emacs (and the whole
concept of having a complete Lisp engine embedded in the editor). He
wrote Emacs in around 197x in a programming language called TECO for the
ITS Operating System which he co-wrote on a PDP-10 machine at the MIT AI
Labs. There were a lot of Emacs implementations in those days, I
remember Symbolics had one which they used to sell with their own Lisp
machine. Gosling's Emacs was called `Gosmacs' and it was the first one
for the UNIX (or UNIX like) Operating System (to be noted that rms had
never used UNIX or C at that time).
Later when rms started the GNU Project he re-wrote Emacs using a
portable programming language (C) for a portable Operating System (UNIX
or POSIX [a term coined by rms]).
It's fascinating if you realise that GNU Emacs is probably one of the
oldest surviving (and widely used) application in the world (30 years
old!). Must give credit to rms for his amazing foresight (think about
the GPL).
Regards,
BG
- --
Baishampayan Ghose <b.ghose@xxxxxxx>
The GNU Project
http://www.gnu.org/
1024D/86361B74
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