Was reading a little bit about Emacs history the other night and came across a public access service where you can telnet in and try out TECO, Emacs’ predecessor (and in fact you can get an ancient version of Emacs on there too): TECO was a programmable text editor within which Stallman originally implemented his Editor MACroS.
Here’s some stuff from the Emacs Wiki. A memo describing Emacs for new users at MIT; this is really cool, it’s just all the same stuff I’m using right now to type this:
Finally, of all the people who have contributed to the development of EMACS, and the TECO behind it, special mention and appreciation go to Richard M. Stallman. He not only gave TECO the power and generality it has, but brought together the good ideas of many different Teco-function packages, added a tremendous amount of new ideas and environment, and created EMACS. Personally, one of the joys of my avocational life has been writing Teco/EMACs functions; what makes this fun and not painful is a rich set of tools to work with, all but a few of which have “RMS” chiseled somewhere on them.
And Emacs was bloated even all the way back then:
Running Emacs is equivalent to running a TECO with the EMACS (grossly large) start-up.
Put aside the editors for a minute, here’s a gem for those who don’t care about Emacs: