Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

Rob Landley
2001-06-24T21:57:40Z

On Saturday 23 June 2001 20:13, Michael Alan Dorman wrote:
> Rob Landley <landley@webofficenow.com> writes:
> > That would be the X version of emacs. And there's the explanation
> > for the split between GNU and X emacs: it got forked and the
> > closed-source version had a vew years of divergent development
> > before opening back up, by which point it was very different to
> > reconcile the two code bases.
>
> No, sorry, wrong, for at least a couple of reasons reasons:

I've had this pointed out to me by about five people now. Apparently there's
more to emacs than I thought... (Considering its kitchen sink icon, this
should come as a suprise to no one...)

> I refer you to http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html for
> documentation---JWZ was Mr. Lucid Emacs for quite a time.

Thanks for the link. I've also been pointed to xemacs.org. Have to check
out both next time I plug this laptop in to the net. (And I apparently need
to set up a mailing list on this, since the number of people asking me to do
so has now hit double digits...)

I'll post a thing here when I do that so we can move at least most of this
discussion off linux-kernel.

> In 1987, there are any number of things that it could have been---I'd
> guess either Unipress Emacs or perhaps Gosling Emacs.

I sort of know about gosling's version. (It's mentioned in Stallman's
history of emacs on gnu.org...) Interesting how the same people keep popping
up as you move from topic to topic. (Licklidder wasn't just a bigwig behind
arpanet, he also kicked off project mac at MIT. Doug McIllroy who was one of
the half-dozen figures behind the unix launch at bell labs came to BTL after
working on project whirlwind at Lincoln Labs (I.E. MIT.) And of course Ken
Olsen, hotshot at whirlwind behind core memory, creator of the memory test
computer that (when donated to marvin minsky's computing lab) virtually
created the whole "Hacker" phenomenon, whose wrote a paper as a graduate
student suggesting the use of transistors in computers which convinced IBM to
build the first fully transistorized computer (I -THINK-, timeline still a
bit fuzzy there to claim "first", may just have been first commercially
shipping one), and then of course went off to found Digital after tx-0...

Hmmm... I should probably corner Alan Cox at some event and ask him about
his Amiga days. (And I DID track down Commodore guru Jim Butterfield last
year, he was living in Canada at the time. Just got back into computing
after years with cataracts obstructing his vision, apparently...)

Rob