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
