possible to communicate with a machine not through a series of punched holes but through actual text. A programmer typed in commands and read the line-by-line output generated by the machine.
During the late 1960s, interface design made additional leaps. In a famous 1968 lecture, Doug Engelbart, a scientist then working at the Stanford Research Institute, unveiled a prototype of the modern graphical interface. Rigging up a television set to the computer and adding a pointer device which Engelbart dubbed a “mouse”, the scientist created a system even more interactive than the time-sharing system developed a MIT. Treating the video display like a high-speed printer, Engelbart’s system gave a user the ability to move the cursor around the screen and see the cursor position updated by the computer in real time. The user suddenly had the ability to position text anywhere on the screen.
Such innovations would take another two decades to make their way into the commercial marketplace. Still, by the 1970s, video screens had started to replace teletypes as display terminals, creating the potential for full-screen-as opposed to line-by-line-editing capabilities.
One of the first programs to take advantage of this full-screen capability was the MIT AI Lab’s TECO. Short for Text Editor and COrrector, the program had been upgraded by hackers from an old teletype line editor for the lab’s PDP-6 machine.[4]
TECO was a substantial improvement over old editors, but it still had its drawbacks. To create and edit a document, a programmer had to enter a series of software commands specifying each edit. It was an abstract process. Unlike modern word processors, which update text with each keystroke, TECO demanded that the user enter an extended series of editing instructions followed by an “end of command” sequence just to change the text.Over time, a hacker grew proficient enough to write entire documents in edit mode, but as Stallman himself would later point out, the process required “a mental skill like that of blindfold chess”.[5]
To facilitate the process, AI Lab hackers had built a system that displayed both the “source” and “display” modes on a split screen. Despite this innovative hack, switching from mode to mode was still a nuisance.
TECO wasn’t the only full-screen editor floating around the computer world at this time. During a visit to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1976, Stallman encountered an edit program named E. The program contained an internal feature, which allowed a user to update display text after each command keystroke. In the language of 1970s programming, E was one of the first rudimentary WYSIWYG editors. Short for “what you see is what you get”, WYSIWYG meant that a user could manipulate the file by moving through the displayed text, as opposed to working through a back-end editor program.[6]
Impressed by the hack, Stallman looked for ways to expand TECO’s functionality in similar fashion upon his return to MIT. He found a TECO feature called Control-R, written by Carl Mikkelson and named after the two-key combination that triggered it. Mikkelson’s hack switched TECO from its usual abstract command-execution mode to a more intuitive keystroke-by-keystroke mode. Stallman revised the feature in a subtle but significant way. He made it possible to trigger other TECO command strings, or “macros”, using other, two-key combinations. Where users had once entered command strings and discarded them after entering then, Stallman’s hack made it possible to save macro tricks on file and call them up at will. Mikkelson’s hack had raised TECO to the level of a WYSIWYG editor. Stallman’s hack had raised it to the level of a user-programmable WYSIWYG editor. “That was the real breakthrough”, says Guy Steele, a fellow AI Lab hacker at the time.[6]
By Stallman’s own recollection, the macro hack touched off an explosion of further innovation. “Everybody and his brother was writing his own collection of redefined screen-editor commands, a command for everything he typically liked to do”, Stallman would later recall. “People would pass them around and improve them, making them more powerful and more general. The collections of redefinitions gradually became system programs in their own right”.[6]
So many people found the macro innovations useful and had incorporated it into their own TECO programs that the TECO editor had become secondary to the macro mania it inspired. “We started to categorize it mentally as a programming language rather than as an editor”, Stallman says. Users were experiencing their own pleasure tweaking the software and trading new ideas.[6]
Two years after the explosion, the rate of innovation began to exhibit dangerous side effects. The explosive growth had provided an exciting validation of the collaborative hacker approach, but it had also led to over- complexity. “We had a Tower of Babel effect”, says Guy Steele.
The effect threatened to kill the spirit that had created it, Steele says. Hackers had designed ITS to facilitate programmers’ ability to share knowledge and improve each other’s work. That meant being able to sit down at another programmer’s desk, open up a programmer’s work and make comments and modifications directly within the software. “Sometimes the easiest way to show somebody how to program or debug something was simply to sit down at the terminal and do it for them”, explains Steele.
The macro feature, after its second year, began to foil this capability. In their eagerness to embrace the new full-screen capabilities, hackers had customized their versions of TECO to the point where a hacker sitting down at another hacker’s terminal usually had to spend the first hour just figuring out what macro commands did what.
Frustrated, Steele took it upon himself to the solve the problem. He gathered together the four different macro packages and began assembling a chart documenting the most useful macro commands. In the course of implementing the design specified by the chart, Steele says he attracted Stallman’s attention.
“He started looking over my shoulder, asking me what I was doing”, recalls Steele.
For Steele, a soft-spoken hacker who interacted with Stallman infrequently, the memory still sticks out. Looking over another hacker’s shoulder while he worked was a common activity at the AI Lab. Stallman, the TECO maintainer at the lab, deemed Steele’s work “interesting” and quickly set off to complete it.
“As I like to say, I did the first 0.001 percent of the implementation, and Stallman did the rest”, says Steele with a laugh.
The project’s new name, Emacs, came courtesy of Stallman. Short for “editing macros”, it signified the evolutionary transcendence that had taken place during the macros explosion two years before. It also took advantage of a gap in the software programming lexicon. Noting a lack of programs on ITS starting with the letter “E”, Stallman chose Emacs, making it possible to reference the program with a single letter. Once again, the hacker lust for efficiency had left its mark.[6]
In the course of developing a standard system of macro commands, Stallman and Steele had to traverse a political tightrope. In creating a standard program, Stallman was in clear violation of the fundamental hacker tenet-“promote decentralization”. He was also threatening to hobble the very flexibility that had fueled TECO’s explosive innovation in the first place.
“On the one hand, we were trying to make a uniform command set again; on the other hand, we wanted to
