Multics Emacs
Multics version of Emacs text editor
Multics Emacs is an early implementation of the Emacs text editor. It was written in Maclisp by Bernard Greenberg at Honeywell's Cambridge Information Systems Lab in 1978, as a successor to the original 1976 TECO implementation of Emacs and a precursor of later GNU Emacs.
It has been claimed to be the first version of Emacs to be written in the Lisp programming language, although the same claim has also been made for the Lisp Machine editors EINE and ZWEI, also written in the late 1970s. As well as the editor itself being written in Lisp, user-supplied extensions were also written in Lisp. The choice of Lisp provided more extensibility than ever before, and has been followed by most subsequent Emacs implementations.
Rather than using TECO's gap buffer representation for the text being edited, it used a doubly linked list of lines of text.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Multics Emacs”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- DPS8M emulator running Multics Emacs screenshot.webp by Software: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bull HN Information Systems, Inc., Bernard Greenberg, Bull SAS, and The DPS8M Developer Team Screenshot: VulcanSphere, Public domain
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