'Mother of all editors' Emacs is 50

By a startling coincidence, so is its arch-rival Vi.

The short version

• No lesser authority than the MIT Technology Review says that the Emacs editor has turned 50 years old.
• But then, it is biased — Emacs was invented in MIT's AI lab.
• The name is an abbreviation for " E diting MAC ro S ", and the original editor for which this set of macros was developed was TECO – "Text Editor and COrrector," written by Dan Murphy in 1962.

What happened

Murphy  died earlier this year at the age of 83. The inimitable Jamie Zawinski has an encyclopedic Emacs Timeline – as he mentions at the start, his interest being that he long ago maintained a fork of GNU Emacs, originally called Lucid Emacs .

Why it matters

It's still around, under its later name XEmacs.

Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at The Register — Networks via the links above and below.