[ale] Emacs and RMS (was Re: [ale] gentoo)

[Michael Hirsch]

On Tue, 2002-08-27 at 12:16, Geoffrey wrote:
> Michael Hirsch wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Gasp!  You are giving me a heart attack just thinking about that. 
> > Must...have....Emacs...
> 
> Heh, heh, I've been using vi so long, that when I started, there was an 
> old joke floating around about emacs:  "EMACS stands for eight megs and 
> constantly swapping."  How old do you supposed that one is?  It was 
> relevant to the hardware at the time. :)

That joke was around at least in 1986.  Back them 8 Meg was a lot!  You
learned to never kill your emacs, just suspend it.  It always seemed so
wasteful of the vi users to start it afresh each time, but it did start
up so quickly!

I recently read a biography of Stallman.  (It's freely (as in speech)
available on the web, it you don't need hard copy.)  It was interesting
to me to note that when I started using Emacs (version 17) it hadn't
really been around that long.  RMS only started GNU a couple years
before.

Also interesting to me was that Stallman was not a Unix hacker when the
GNU project was started.  He cast around for a good OS to clone and
decided that Unix was it, but MIT, where RMS lived, was not a Unix
shop.  He was a multics hacker.

Michael


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