🚀 go-pugleaf

>From sklower Mon Oct  5 15:31:32 1981
Mail-from: ARPANET site MIT-MULTICS rcvd at 2-Oct-81 0733-PDT
Date:     2 October 1981 1012-edt
From:     Bernard S. Greenberg       <Greenberg at MIT-Multics>
Subject:  Re: emacs and unix
To:       CSVAX.wilensky at BERKELEY
Cc:       CSVAX.emacs at BERKELEY, CSVAX.wnj at BERKELEY,
     arpavax.fabry at BERKELEY, editor-people at SU-SCORE

At this stage of retrospect, I think that the general approach I took
(in Multics Emacs) of lumping all the functionality of which you
speak into one program was technically wrong but morally defensible.
It seems pretty clear now that there ought be window managers, video
systems, terminal-support paradigms, input-line editors, etc, outside of
the editor, and the Editor ought use a maximal subset of them.  This
is what the Lisp Machine does, and it operates very smoothly.

Much of Multics Emacs' vast (too vast?) functionality was due to
political and management problems at Honeywell.  It was a lot easier to
rebuild a better world bottom up inside Emacs than to convince distant,
uninterested troglodytic legions that the product should be redone
bottom up.  It was extremely important to jam people's eyes open to see
what kind of things could be done, and Emacs did this well; the price
that was paid is Emacs' competition with Multics as a user environment
as opposed to being a part of it.  Now Multics people are seriously
developing generalized video and window support; this could not have
happened had there not been Emacs first.

Multics Emacs turned into an attempt to build a Multics Lisp Machine.
As such, it is grossly successful.  As an editor it is grossly
successful.  As an integrated part of Multics, though, I guess it is
a flop; precisely because it calls every conceivable package of
functionality in Multics, in order to have the "Emacs Mail System"
(from which I am sending this, of course) to compete with the
"Multics [extended] Mail System" and so on, it has created divisive
and counterproductive duplication of function all over the Multics
user ring.

It took Multics people many years to see the difference between
terminal support, input line editing (!!!!!!!!$%&%#!!!), managed
video, windows, and Emacs.  That's not the way it ought to be.
Hopefully, the advent of couple-of-kilobuck office automation
systems with sophisticated screen management paradigms will help
people be able to evaluate these different levels of facility
and their needs for same in a more precise manner.


Of course, as soon as I type ^X^C, I will STILL be back to counting
#'s ..... nihil novum sub sole...