ngse18@castle.ed.ac.uk (J R Evans) writes: >Does anyone still have a set of Stallman's >original emacs? Just how much of later emacs did they implement and >how well do they work in modern TECO's? [Any changes needed should be >minimal, surely?] As an attempt to answer this, here's a brief history of TECO, cobbled together from rumors and forgotten documents. Please feel free to post corrections. The original Emacs was a set of TECO macros written on top of MIT TECO, which ran under ITS (MIT's Incompatible Timesharing System) and TOPS-10 and TENEX on DEC PDP-10s, and later PDP-20s. The name "Emacs" stands for "editing macros" originally written in TECO. As Emacs became popular, it became more important than the TECO "beneath" it. Many Emacs users didn't even know TECO, or need to. Improvements to TECO were made specifically to improve Emacs. One of these improvements was changing TECO from an interpreter to a compiler, which allowed TECO macros to execute fast enough to make Emacs bearable. This TECO actually compiles interactively-typed command strings before executing them. What fun! Portablility wasn't a concern during this effort. When the time came to port Emacs to other machines, Stallman decided to use a better language than TECO for the base. Even with all the improvements, TECO isn't a great language for writing large programs. Most Emacs editors use some form of Lisp, which is one of the few langauges other than TECO with the flexibility needed by a customizable editor like Emacs. While all this was going on, people using various smaller DEC machines needed a fast, powerful editor, so they wrote TECOs for PDP-11s and PDP-8s. These TECOs evolved separately, and had slightly different commands and features. At some point Stan Rabinowitz started an effort in the DECUS TECO SIG to standardize them. Stan got the maintainers of TECO-10 (for PDPs running TENEX and TOPS), TECO-11 (for PDP-11s running RSX, RT-11 or RSTS/E), TECO-8 (for PDP-8s running OS/8) to bring ther programs closer together, but several somewhat minor differences still exist. Later, Rick Murphy translated TECO-11 to TECO-32 for VAXes running VMS. TECO-32 is functionally identical to TECO-11. These TECOs are described by the "Standard TECO Manual" (used to be the PDP-11 TECO Manual), much of which was written by Stan and Mark Bramhall at DEC. The manual is in the archive on usc.edu in the teco.doc file. The version of the manual in the archive is more up-to-date than the one you'll get from DEC, because they haven't updated the documentation folks. The original TECO is far more powerful than the DEC versions. It had many commands that make sense only on PDP-10s or under operating systems on 10s and 20s, and is too large to fit on machines with limited memory. Some users of the original TECO consider it the only "real" TECO. The TECOs found in the archive on usc.edu are all based on the TECO described by the "Standard TECO Manual". I've considered adding the original TECO and Emacs to the archive, but simply haven't gotten around to it. Adding it would probably more than double the size of the archive. At the risk is raising that hackles of its users, I suggest that it is of only historical interest to most people, since 10s and 20s are becoming rare. So: Stallman's original Emacs doesn't have a chance of running with what Russ calls "more modern" TECOs. The Emacs packages in the archive, which are much smaller than the original, are the only game in town. If you are interested in Emacs, GNU Emacs is by far the best Emacs (and probably the best editor) in existence. -- Pete Siemsen Pete Siemsen siemsen@usc.edu University of Southern California 645 Ohio Ave. #302 (213) 740-7391 (w) 1020 West Jefferson Blvd. Long Beach, CA 90814 (213) 433-3059 (h) Los Angeles, CA 90089-0251