· ai-devtools
'Mother of all editors' Emacs is 50
No lesser authority than the MIT Technology Review says that the Emacs editor has turned 50 years old.
But then, it is biased — Emacs was invented in MIT's AI lab. Simson Garfinkel's article is simply called EMACS turns 50, but the sub-heading explains why it matters more: "How the MIT AI Lab's text editor gave birth to the free software movement."
There are multiple timelines and accounts of the origins of Emacs, and it is not a single monolithic application. The name is an abbreviation for "Editing MACroS", and the original editor for which this set of macros was developed was TECO – "Text Editor and COrrector," written by Dan Murphy in 1962.
Murphy died earlier this year at the age of 83. The inimitable Jamie Zawinski has an encyclopedic Emacs Timeline – as he mentions at the start, his interest being that he long ago maintained a fork of GNU Emacs, originally called Lucid Emacs.
It's still around, under its later name XEmacs. There are a lot of forks and re-implementations of Emacs out there, and we are not going to go into all of them, or this article would become a book – one only interesting to programmer-archeologists (to use a term coined by the late great Vernor Vinge).
