On Jul 17, 4:16 pm, "DFS" <nospam@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hadron wrote:
> > "DFS" <nospam@xxxxxxxx> writes:
> Emacs is a strange program. It looks like a good text editor, but why does
> it have a calendar and a calculator, and what's it doing reading news and
> sending email? I downloaded Emacs for Windows (This is GNU Emacs 22.2.1
> (i386-mingw-nt5.2.3790) of 2008-03-26 on RELEASE) and for some reason it
> doesn't even support Ctrl+C or Ctrl+V? The psychotherapist is a hoot!
Remember, Emacs was first written in 1976 by Richard Stallman, but he
encouraged people to share the source code. It was originally written
for a DEC processor, but quickly found it's way to UNIX. Emacs
supported LISP, which allowed people to do all sorts of interesting
things with text "objects". Very quickly, Emacs became the "Windows"
of the Unix world. You could split the screen horizontally and
vertically, and there were even context sensitive helps that you could
get by pressing <ctrl-h> (which also happened to be the backspace key
on most terminals), and you could bind terminal keys to various lisp
functions.
The biggest problem was that most terminal only had an 80x25 line
display. If you were lucky, you could get a terminal with a 132 x 50
line display, but those were the exception rather than the rule.
The Emacs terminal handling was also the model for X11 Windows
terminal handling (and the Windows GDI). The BSD terminal interface
was Curses, which had various static strings for a very limited set of
functions. The Emacs interface set up lisp commands for the most
common functions and then the right set of instructions, including
parameters would be pulled based on the terminal you were using. So
if you had a terminal that could position the cursor to an x-y
coordinate, you would use the lisp command that would send the right
escape sequence, converting the x and y components to the right string
equivalents.
The early X displays were often DEC VT-300 graphics terminals, or
Tektronix 4010 style terminals (some of which had resolutions up to
4096x4096 monochrome), the Xlibrary would send to the x "wire" and the
"server" would simply convert the Xlib requests into the appropriate
terminal command strings. Later, X-Terminals were created with the
ability to convert Xlib commands into graphics card commands such as
the Texas Instruments TIGA command set. The main difference between a
PC and an X-Terminal was that the X-terminal didn't have a hard drive
or floppy drive (ram was loaded from network) and the cards and
displays had much higher resolution than most PCs.
On the other hand, if you had a high resolution display on your PC,
you could run an application that turned a window on your PC into an X-
Terminal. Hummingbird and Chameleon had this ability, and there were
some shareware X-terminal programs for specific chip-sets.
Today, Linux has X11 built in. Mac has it as an option. and you can
get a cheap X-terminal for Windows by installing cygwin and asking it
to install xterm (which loads the rest of the X11 stuff). On cygwin,
you have to start it from a bash command-line, but I've used it to
remotely access GUI interfaces for AIX, Solaris, HP_UX, and Linux
applications, including the desktop interfaces.
Today, emacs may seem a bit "primitive", but within emacs are most of
the core concepts of modern "desktops" and "windowed" environments.
Imagine if Richard Stallman had been able to patent those Emacs
devices under the same rules today, back in 1984. My guess is that we
would have been cursing him for his monopoly over GNU and we might
have been hating HURD.
Just a thought.
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