September 1996
Beginner to intermediate
568 pages
20h 31m
English
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GNU Emacs and the Free Software Foundation
You don’t need to know its history to use GNU Emacs, but its sources are an interesting part of recent computer history. The Free Software Foundation (FSF), which maintains and distributes GNU Emacs, has become an important part of computer culture.
A long time ago (1975), Richard Stallman at MIT wrote the first Emacs editor. According to the folklore, the original Emacs editor was a set of macros for TECO, an almost incomprehensible and now obsolete line editor. The name Emacs stands for “Editing Macros.” Tradition also has it that Emacs is a play on the name of a favorite ice cream store. Much has happened since 1975. TECO has slipped into deserved obscurity, and Emacs has been rewritten as an independent program. Several commercial versions of Emacs have appeared, of which Unipress Emacs and CCA Emacs were the most important. For several years, these commercial implementations were the Emacs editors you were most likely to run across outside of the academic world.
Stallman’s Emacs became prominent with the birth of the FSF and the GNU Project. GNU stands for “GNU’s Not UNIX” and refers to a complete UNIX-like operating system that Stallman and his associates are building. Stallman founded the FSF to guarantee that some software would always remain free. Free does not necessarily mean cheap (you may have to pay a fee to cover the cost of distribution); it most definitely means liberated from restrictions about how it can be used.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.