🚀 go-pugleaf

There are several Emacen (pl?) around for the PC.  Most of them, however,
are rather home-brew, including the one I use most of the time.
I do know of one, however, that's both comprehensive and commercially
available.  It's Unipress Emacs, from Unipress Software, Inc.,
Suite 312, 2025 Lincoln Highway, Edison, NJ 08817, (201) 985-8000.

On 8/20/85,  the price was $325 for binary, $995 for source, and supposedly
they had versions available for PC, AT, Rainbow 100, TI-PC, HP150, and
"generic MS-DOS".  Unipress also claimed to have at PC-AT/Xenix version
forthcoming, and a wide range of Unix and VMS versions also available.

On the positive side -

Unipress Emacs is essentially a MS-DOS adaptation of Gosling's Emacs.
It's totally user-extensible; you can write your own library routines
in MLisp.  In fact, it's probably capable of doing almost any function
that full-blown Gosling's Unix Emacs will do, given the constraint that
it's now running on a single-user, single-tasking system.

On the negative side -

Like Gosling's Emacs, I consider this one to be somewhat of a dinosaur.
It takes a hefty amount of memory (the program itself is around 250K),
and even loading it from a hard disk on a PC-AT and then waiting for
it to initialize can take ten or fifteen seconds.  The really powerful
functions are all in the form of ".ml" files, so you have this fairly
massive directory somewhere (say a megabyte or two?) that contains all
these functions.  Also, I use a color graphics card with an RGB monitor;
I haven't found a way to get it to run in color (though I haven't tried
real hard), and it apparently doesn't wait for retrace to paint the
screen (I get annoying "snow" whenever it displays anything).

bill frolik
hp-pcd!bill