40 Years of EMACS

I’ve been using Emacs for a very long time, starting back in about 1981 on a Prime minicomputer. That was an interesting implementation; it took a solid five minutes to start up, but once you were in it you seldom had to leave. That was good because we were using glass TTYs and only one thing could run at a time. But Emacs was still an immensely powerful tool.

Then PCs came along and the Emacs implementations were, at least at first, not complete. There were the small spinoffs like MicroEmacs, and the commercial products which were Emacs-like but not the same. Finally there were decent implementations, and of course with the advent of Linux, Emacs was fully established.

And now we have a decent Emacs on Android tablets. Termux has come along and we can replicate almost everything on a tablet or phone (although text only at this point). Imagine: sending email with gnus on your smartphone.

I think I’m at least reasonably good with Emacs and hack ELisp code all the time, but I don’t consider myself an expert to the degree of the real experts out there. I’ve written a few packages, some good, some less so. In these columns I’ll share my Emacs experiences and some of the things I’ve learned and observed over the years.

I use Emacs for almost everything these days, from reading mail to keeping my calendar and to-do list, publishing books and stories and simple blogging … and a whole lot more.

Use index.html in this directory, http://www.bobnewell.net/publish/35years/index.html. I know the site isn’t very pretty.

Now, here’s the mandatory legal disclaimer: there are no guarantees as to accuracy and you use any information I provide at your own risk. I assume no liabilities of any kind under any legal theory whatsoever.