Lomcevak

As I age, I find that I’ve developed an appreciation for tech history. I was delighted this morning to run across a short piece by Dan Murphy, the creator of TECO, entitled The Beginnings of TECO.

You see, TECO was the editor for which Richard Stallman created a macro package called Emacs (for Editor MACroS). A flavor of Emacs is usually the first program I launch and the last to quit. It’s been that way since the mid eighties, which is around when it became very useful to me to be able to edit text on a variety of different platforms. For Emacs has been ported to just about every computing platform there is. As a matter of fact, I’m writing this piece in an Emacs buffer right now! (Before you ask, the implementation I use these days is from Lugaru Software, LTD. Theirs is a commercial product, but go visit them for a fully capable free trial.)

But I digress – go read The Beginnings of TECO for a fascinating glimpse into the past, when things were more… well, interesting… in some ways than they are today.

[...] TECO was nothing if not terse. Fairly complex loops and other command sequences could be written in TECO, and mostly looked like line noise. TECO was one of the first languages to spawn the practice of handing someone a one-line string of near gibberish and asking with a grin, “tell me what it does.”

Okay, I’ll admit it: I’m part of the ol’ ‘emacs and make’ camp.

I’ll leave out the gory details. Either you know what I mean or I need to write way too long in order to explain. I discovered emacs when I was regularly working on multiple computing platforms and tired of having to reprogram my fingers each time I set out to do some editing on one or another. Installing an emacs on each allowed me to type the same way no matter where I sat. It didn’t take long for me to realize that if there’s anything at all to do with text, either emacs could already do it or one could teach it how. To this day, while it’s not true emacs, Lugaru’s epsilon product runs on each machine I touch regularly. In fact, I’ll use it to turn these words, typed in Microsoft word, into words that Wordpress will digest and present to your eyes nicely. It’s one of the precious few products for which I’ll buy the latest revision without thinking.

Anyway, when I hear emacs mentioned my ears perk up. This was definitely one of the odder ones.

Before the day before yesterday I never heard of “Emacs.Net”. Apparently, this is something going on inside Microsoft. What, I don’t know. I found a few spots of coverage in the press and, other than that, not much except for this blog entry.

Can anyone point me to more information? I’m curious, really curious. I mean, two things I don’t associate naturally are Microsoft and emacs. Go figure. But then, when you’re done,  please come back and tell me what you figure.