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[Your mailer puts "Dave Lawrence" in your From field, making replies
difficult.  - pf]

    Date: Thursday, December 29, 1988  10:54pm (CST)
    From: Dave Lawrence
    Subject: GNU Elisp -- Summary
     
    And the Emacs name?  Keith Gabryelski <elgar!ag@ucsd.edu>:
    
    ]Emacs was an ice-cream parlor around MIT where RMS (the original
    ]writer of ITS EMACS) hung out.  EMACS use to be a set of macros in
    ]ITS TECO.  It seems EMACS could also stand for Editor MACroS.
    ]The former I heard from a friend of RMS (LIZZY@AI).  The latter from
    ]the ITS EMACS Manual.

Emack and Bolios is a chain of ice cream parlors in the Boston area.
The closest one to MIT is in Harvard Square.  Don't go there, though, go
to Toscanini's just off campus, or to Herrell's in Allston -- their ice
cream is much better.  There also used to be an ITS text formatter
called Bolio.
    
    (Now I wonder what that ITS stands for ... seems as though we have an
    ITS (Information Technology Services) here and I bet it's not the one
    meant.)

ITS is the Incompatible Timesharing System, an MIT operating system for
DEC PDPs that started on a PDP-6 in 1966.  MIT-AI and MIT-MC were
PDP-10s running ITS.  The name is a reaction to CTSS, the Compatible
Time Sharing System, which ran on IBM 709s and 7094s at MIT from 1961 to
1973.

While ITS has many good points, its user-interface is a lot like using
adb as your login shell (the command-line interpreter is DDT, the
debugger).  However, some people prefer it to anything else, so it
survives at MIT today on three KS-10s (2020s) and in modified form in
LSI-11 gateway boxes.


Paul Fuqua
Texas Instruments Computer Science Center, Dallas, Texas
CSNet:  pf@csc.ti.com (ARPA too, sometimes)
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