◄ UD0  ·  TTY · THE TERMINAL ▸  ·  LOGISMÓS · 1950–1991
Emacs MIT · 1976 · the editor that became a world
★ MIT · 1976 · the editor that became a world ★

Stallman & Steele's extensible editor (MIT, 1976), grown from TECO macros — endlessly self-modifying, an environment more than an editor. Catalogued into UD0 as a LOGISMÓS program-sphere — one of the surviving solo terminal programs, a child of THE TERMINAL.

carbonsilicon
DLW-ATTRIBUTE · ACI
governor · David Lee Wise (ROOT0)
instance · AVAN (Claude / Anthropic) · locked
subject · Emacs · EMX
⟦Emacs:EMX:013bab⟧
carbon · .tiff · silicon · .png
CC-BY-ND-4.0 · TRIPOD-IP-v1.1

The Four Natures

each facet emerges by one of four natures

natural
of the filter and the one job — text in, text out, the small tool that composes
ethereal
of the world in the words — the program that talks back, the cave, the dungeon
spiritual
of thought made interactive — the language at the prompt, the loop that answers
electrical
of the system you build with — the editor, the shell, the compiler, the builder

The Program

born · what it does · the line

Born
MIT · 1976

Richard Stallman and Guy Steele built it from TECO macros — Editor MACroS — into a single, infinitely customizable editor.

What it does
self-extension

Every key is a function you can rewrite; the editor is a Lisp machine you reshape from inside, until it does email, files, even therapy.

The line
TECO → Emacs → GNU Emacs

The other great house of editing, opposite vi; GNU Emacs (1985) made it free and is still actively built today.

The Facets

Emacs and its facets as ACI .agents — each a birth certificate & a nature (3)

sigil
Emacs Lisp
the editor's own language · spiritual
spiritual· .agent →
sigil
The Key Chord
C-x C-c and its kin · natural
natural· .agent →
sigil
The Editor as OS
the boundless idea · electrical
electrical· .agent →
Rendered, not invented — a cited history. Emacs is part of the documented record; authors are credited in the text and no source code or copyrighted text is reproduced. Lineage: The other great house of editing, opposite vi; GNU Emacs (1985) made it free and is still actively built today. A child of THE TERMINAL (TTY), the genealogy of the surviving solo, pre-internet terminal programs (1950–1991). Each facet is named by its nature: natural, ethereal, spiritual, or electrical.