On that page Guy Steele says "(3) RMS is responsible for the names “E” and “EMACS”. RMS still deserves 99% or 99.9% or 99.99% or 99.999% of the credit for taking a package of TECO macros and turning it into the most powerful editor on the planet, twice (first in TECO and then with ELISP),"

I really dislike the term invent when applied to creating software. Emacs was never invented, it was written (or if you prefer, coded). Text editors were invented long before Emacs. Just iterating and improving on a concept doesn't make you inventor.

To be fair: "text editors" really hadn't been invented "long before emacs". At the time (the early 1970's) editing text was a subject of much research and experimentation. Differing paradigms were being tried on new and exciting hardware (the glass tty). Screen editors, as they came to be known, were a brand new curiosity -- they were equally disruptive (if not more so) as the "web application" or "capacitive touchscreen interface" would be decades later.

And emacs was one of the very first screen editors. It invented lots of the stuff that would later seem "obvious".

So no: I think it's entirely appropriate to say that emacs was "invented" in the same way the browser was.

It's before my time, but my impression was that both TECO and EMACS originated as teletype line editors (as with ed and ex, the direct predecessors to vi), and were only later adapted to fancy new screen terminals. Am I mistaken?

I likewise was never a user. But the EMACS package of TECO macros was intended specifically to enable screen editting on terminals as I understand it (though surely there was overlap). Basically EMACS:TECO as vi:ex.

"Just iterating and improving on a concept doesn't make you inventor."

Using this criteria, who would you name as inventors? I can't think of a single one!

It doesn't make you inventor of the concept; it makes you inventor of the improvement.

People's thinking about some of these things (questions of terminology, etc.) was still evolving 30 years ago. I'd be interested to see if he still refers to himself as the inventor of EMACS. At the time he me have considered it an alternative way of saying "author" or "creator".

There is also an argument to be made that EMACS was not an improvement over TECO. TECO had a very similar command structure to vi — optional count, command, and optional argument terminated by ESC. (I have not seen any evidence that vi imitated TECO rather than arriving at the same structure independently.)

> There is also an argument to be made that EMACS was not an improvement over TECO.

Full disclosure: I've been using emacs since 1981.

ISTR TECO under TOPS was a PITA.

eg. From Sec 4-1

Some characters, like <CTRL/U>, are both regular TECO commands and immediate action commands. The command string ^Uqtext` enters the specified text into Q-register q. However, <CTRL/U> typed while entering a command string is an immediate action editing character which deletes the current line. Thus you cannot type a <CTRL/U> (or any similar sequence) directly into TECO as part of a command string. Nevertheless, <CTRL/U> is still a valid TECO command; should TECO encounter it in a macro or indirect file, it will have its regular TECO effect (^Uqtext`).

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/73final/documentation/pdf/teco...

Sure; that's an effect of having a terminal line edit character (^U for erase line) also in use as an editor command. I'm not defending the details of TECO's particular commands.

But it reminds me of the first time I tried EMACS, actually, and my reaction to backspace bringing up a help file.

I've used TECO on a VAX. There is no argument to be made that emacs isn't an improvement over TECO.

Compared to modern editors, TECO is incredibly difficult to use. Hell, it's incredibly difficult to use compared to vi and emacs.