🚀 go-pugleaf

>From RWK@SCRC-TENEX@MIT-AI Fri Feb 19 10:51:51 1982
    Date: 17 Feb 1982 1641-PST
    From: Stephen Hansen <ICL.HANSEN at SU-SCORE>
    Subject: EMACS on a VAX
    To: editor-people at SU-SCORE

	I will be doing a large amount of work on a VAX running VMS and am
     rather disappointed with the editors normally available on the system.  I
     wonder if any of you know of a version of EMACS or any other reasonable
     screen editor that will run on VMS.  Running Eunice or otherwise putting
     a UNIX shell on top of the VMS system is not possible for this system so
     the editor would have to be compatable with the standard VMS system.  Any
     help or information that you can give me would be appreciated.

I am at a loss to guess why you view an EMACS using Eunice as being
incompatible with a standard VMS system!  It doesn't castrate your VMS,
EMACS is just a .EXE file.  It is a completely separate program from the
unix shell which Eunice also provides.  The *ONLY* two things from
Eunice that you need to run EMACS are the subroutine libraries (these
simulate the Unix system calls and such) and the termcap terminal
database.  In fact, the systems I've used with EMACS have had no part of
EUNICE at all except for what was linked in with EMACS and the TERMCAP
database.

There is a much more severe problem to be faced.  James Gosling at CMU
(the author of VAX EMACS) doesn't want it freely distributed.  Basicly,
he'd like recompense for his labors on EMACS, which is a very reasonable
position.  However, he currently has no mechanism for licensing.  If you
are a non-commercial site he might be willing to give you permission to
use it, you can ask him.  I believe the EUNICE licensing is very
straightforward.

I've used this at MIT on VMS with Dave Kashtan's enhancements and it
makes a big difference in VMS's usability, especially since you can run
VMS DCL commands directly from EMACS with the output going to an EMACS
buffer.