1 A History of Emacs

SXEmacs is a powerful, customizable text editor and development environment. It was forked from the XEmacs 21.4 code base in 2004. XEmacs began as Lucid Emacs, which was in turn derived from GNU Emacs, a program written by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation. GNU Emacs dates back to the 1970’s, and was modelled after a package called “Emacs”, written in 1976, that was a set of macros on top of TECO, an old, old text editor written at MIT on the DEC PDP 10 under one of the earliest time-sharing operating systems, ITS (Incompatible Timesharing System). (ITS dates back well before Unix.) ITS, TECO, and Emacs were products of a group of people at MIT who called themselves “hackers”, who shared an idealistic belief system about the free exchange of information and were fanatical in their devotion to and time spent with computers. (The hacker subculture dates back to the late 1950’s at MIT and is described in detail in Steven Levy’s book Hackers. This book also includes a lot of information about Stallman himself and the development of Lisp, a programming language developed at MIT that underlies Emacs.)