Multics Emacs: The History, Design and Implementation (1979) | Hacker News Reader

Multics Emacs: The History, Design and Implementation (1979)

multicians.org

69 pointsPlugawy7 comments

Such a wonderful writeup! I fondly remember reading this while writing an Emacs clone in Erlang ("Ermacs"), spending time with Hemlock under CMUCL, watching Climacs evolve for SBCL, etc.

Emacs has a rich history indeed with many other branches of the family tree than GNU Emacs.

> It was soon found that Emacs could be taught within minutes or an hour to those with no technical experience at all.

Wow. Nowadays the ability to use Emacs is considered one of the pinnacles of technical accomplishment.

You can still teach someone Emacs in an hour and have them be able to reasonably edit text. It's just that other editors got better now, so you'll have to put in some hours to get on the same level as with the editor you're used to.

It's interesting to read about the debate between doing editing/screen-drawing on the physical terminal ('smart' hardware) and doing it all in software. The wheel of reincarnation in action! Something we've seen in tech constantly, the balance between local vs distant computing determined by bandwidth/latency... Lately, smartphones, desktops and VR or sound: should the processing be done in the headphone/headset or away in in the PC/smartphone?

I really liked the SUPDUP but that section describing it doesn't really get to the intense crockishness of the protocol. It really was ITS terminal control brought out over the network: the capabilities were the 36-bit terminal descriptors sent over the network in PDP-10 order.

DLW later wrote a different Emacs implementation in Lisp, Zwei, for the Lisp Machine, which was even more deeply intertwined in the system than Multics Emacs was in Multics. Zwei (Zwei was Eine Initially) followed Eine (Eine is not Emacs)

FWIW both programmers mentioned in that section, DLW (Dan Weinreb) and MRC (Mark Crispin), died relatively young.

Is there an emulator that can run MULTICS?

https://sourceforge.net/projects/dps8m/

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