'Mother of all editors' Emacs is 50
https://www.theregister.com/applications/2026/11/01/mother-of-all-editors-emacs-is-50/5306727
By a startling coincidence, so is its arch-rival Vi
<- by me on #TheRegister
.
@snowyfox A full stop to tech? Well, yes, we will probably get that when global warming really hits.
@lproven In a third startling coincidence, 'smart' terminals are ALSO 50 years old!
No, not really. Glass TTYs were a decade earlier, and they started getting control codes in the late 1960s.
Datapoint 3300, announced the year I was born...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_3300
Paid for the Datapoint 2200...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200
Announced '69 and containing the forerunner of what evolved into the Intel 8080 and thus led to the x86 architecture.
The Lear Siegler ADM1 in 1973...
https://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/Lear_Siegler_ADM-1
This was the ancestor of the cheaper ADM3, which gave us `~` for home and H/J/K/L for directions in Vi.
@lproven Speaking as someone who lived through those times :-) college computer labs started getting "smart" terminals right around '75 - '76. Perhaps this was when they were cheap enough for undergrads, I don't know. But I do know that it provided an interesting distraction for programming and 'visual' editors became the 'new' thing. Also when Bright did his empire game, same thing. 1/2
@lproven I'm *not* saying there were terminals available earlier than that, just that access to them had reached the idle and curious hands of people like me who found doing "graphics" on them more fun than line printer pin-up pictures. So the number of 'visual' tools proliferated. 2/2
@ChuckMcManis Ahh, right, fair enough. I got to university a decade later, with elderly DEC VTs everywhere...
Nov 1, 2026, 5:22 PM@lproven
Imagine someone hating Emacs with furious fanatism because it makes editing easier than before and then you are making cognitive discharge and getting dumber... wait!
Never mind, congrats Emacs.
@paelnever Pardon?