Emacs nostalgia (was: Linux text editors)

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Thursday, September 16, 2004 2:33 PM -0500 Fritz Whittington 
<f.whittington at att.net> wrote:

> My experience was at the opposite end.  I first learned emacs on a Lisp
> Machine, using the so-called space-cadet keyboard.
> (ctrl-meta-hyper-super-cokebottle!).  But it didn't have a single Help
> key....

I remember walking by the Lisp Machine company's office when I went from 
MIT towards Hahvahd Square (often to go to the arcade up there). They had a 
big cons cell as a logo on the front of the building. Alas, I never got to 
play with one, and I've only seen photos of the legendary keyboard.

I learned Emacs on a Tops-20 timesharing system running on a PDP-10. I 
think it was also available for Multics (predecessor to Unix). The PDP-10 
had a 36-bit word and was NOT byte-based. Characters were often stored as 4 
9-bit values to a word, so it was natural to store extra "bucky" bits like 
Ctrl and Meta in the extra bits.