Emacs for the HP49G | Hacker News Reader

Emacs for the HP49G

staff.science.uva.nl

63 pointsbrudgers18 comments

To clarify: this is not Emacs. Instead, it is a text editor that features improvements over the built-in editor. It was partly written by Carsten Dominik (creator of Org mode), who is an Emacs user. Some features were inspired by Emacs, but the similarities end there.

Insofar as this is true, the original EMACS was not Emacs, either. Instead, it was a collection of Editor MACroS for TECO.

I’ve read the TECO was a nightmare to use.

Maybe, but "you can hack anything that you want with just TECO and DDT." http://redmartian.com/napster/Red_Martian_-_Deny_Authority_2...

TECO got easier to use with time, especially after the MIT people added ^R (Realtime) mode, which showed a whole screenful of text at a time as opposed to the earlier behavior where TECO would print on command but was otherwise like ed instead of vi. Makes sense, seeing as how TECO originally stood for Tape Editor and COrrector, as in paper tape.

TECO's main claim to fame was its command language, which became its programming language: People wrote programs (including the original EMACS) in TECO's command language, where most commands were non-printable characters in ASCII. There were conventions to print those characters readably (well, readable for human TECO users), such as printing Esc as $, but the fact remained you were programming with line noise. ;)

There's a TECO for modern systems, called Video TECO, here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/videoteco/

Manual:

http://www.copters.com/teco.html

Wiki on TECO, with lots more links:

http://wiki.c2.com/?TecoEditor

Probably what you mean is that it's not "GNU Emacs"

In case someone else doesn't know what a HP49G is: its a graphic calculator [1]:

"The HP49G is Hewlett-Packard's latest graphic calculator. It has 512K of RAM (split into two 256KB ports: Port 0 and Port 1) and 2MB of flash memory. 1MB of flash memory is used by the upgradeable ROM and the other 1MB is available to the user (in Port 2). It has the same 4 MHz Saturn CPU as the 48G series, but the software is rewritten to make the calculator operate more quickly."

Apparently according to Wikipedia this specific type was introduced in 1999 and discontinued in 2003. [2]

Not sure how popular this specific type was. Personally (ie. my bubble), I used a TI (I forgot the exact type, likely TI-83) and this was more or less mandated by the school (used for mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, and ehh.. "notes"..). If you had a different type you were on your own. From what I remember they were programmable, and you could install software on them as well. I guess I'd expect "that other" text editor before Emacs though wink.

Question to fellow readers: what do teenagers use these days on high school? Do they still use graphic calculators? Or is this niche overtaken by say tablets or smartphones? Please do state your country/state.

[1] http://www.hpcalc.org/hp49/docs/faq/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_49/50_series

The HP48G was quite popular among the "tech savvy" in science cursus. One notable feature was that the user interface was based on RPN[1]. Very cool, I've always wondered why this was not the default.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation

It was the default for professional engineers and accountants. TI made calculators for school children, so added an algebraic interface, removed anything not allowed by the College Board exams, and simplified and standardized. Great educational tool. Terrible professional tool.

That said, I learned a lot using an HP in high school and porting over all the TI programs provided by the teacher.

Best calculator ever. Except for the GX with it's 2(!) ROM slots in the back :) There's a iOS version as well.

My brother, who is in high school in SC, uses a TI-NSPIRE CX. They are miles and miles beyond the TI-83 and later TI-89 we used.

Nowadays I use an old HP-42S and Mathematica, depending on what I'm doing. I'm a sucker for RPN.

RPN is also the reason I use the build in calculator in Emacs.

I'm not too far out of high school (graduated in 2011) and I used an HP-50g. Most people when I was there used a TI-83/84 derivative and occasionally the TI Inspire. The hardcore used a Ti-89 or an HP-48/49/50 series.

Two of my favorite things in the same title (although the 49G < 48G)

But does it run Crysis?

This seems nothing related to real Emacs except for a name and ideas...

Emacs is a class of editor these days, not a specific editor.

Emacs has been that way for many many years.

Until recently, GNU Emacs has always had competition for users from xemacs at the least.

GNU Emacs wasn't the original Emacs, either (that was rms' PDP-10 editor built on top of TECO rather than Lisp), or even the original Lisp-based Emacs (that was Daniel Weinreb's EINE (EINE Is Not Emacs) which also had a successor ZWEI (ZWEI Was EINE Initially)). By the time GNU Emacs came out, Emacs was already a family of editors. GNU Emacs was made as a free software alternative to the first Emacs for Unix, Gosling Emacs (made by James Gosling, who later went on to design Java).

In a 1986 speech, rms discussed the beginnings of GNU Emacs:

"GNU Emacs is the main distributed portion of the GNU system. It's an extensible text editor a lot like the original emacs which I developed ten years ago, except that this one uses actual LISP as its extension language. [...] Gosling originally had set up his Emacs and distributed it free and gotten many people to help develop it, under the expectation based on Gosling's own words in his own manual that he was going to follow the same spirit that I started with the original Emacs. Then he stabbed everyone in the back by putting copyrights on it, making people promise not to redistribute it and then selling it to a software-house. My later dealings with him personally showed that he was every bit as cowardly and despicable as you would expect from that history.

"But in any case, my friend gave me this program, and my intention was to change the editing commands at the top level to make them compatible with the original Emacs that I was used to. But after a little bit of this, I discovered that the extension language of that editor, which is called MOCKLISP, was not sufficient for the task. I found that that I had to replace it immediately in order to do what I was planning to do. Before I had had the idea of someday perhaps replacing MOCKLISP with real LISP, but what I found out was that it had do be done first."

The full speech is really interesting: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.en.html

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