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larsbrinkhoff
emacs-history
C2019–2025
larsbrinkhoff / emacs-history

emacs-history

Historical Emacs Software Preservation

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5Distinct people
7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
309GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Historical Emacs Software Preservation

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year7 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2019-10-14 22:01:17 UTC to 2025-04-25 09:07:11 UTC.

01232019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

7 sources
DonHopkins·Apr 25, 2025
Speaking of old obsolete versions of Gosling Emacs, Lars Brinkhoff just posted this source code for UniPress Emacs 2.20 he got from from Hans Hübner! That's the version we called NeMACS, with support for NeWS (Gosling's PostScript based window system), tabbed windows and pie menus, etc: https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history/tree/sources/... So the answer to DVRC's ("Adopter of orphaned technologies") question on June 3, 2023, is yes, finally! HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36166642 DonHopkins on June 2, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs UniPress Emacs for NeWS in 1988: Scriptable GUI, tabbed windows, pie menus, hypermedia authoring tool for HyperTIES browser. Emacs served as a
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n IDE with tabbed window and pie menus, for interactively editing, viewing, and navigating HyperTIES markup language documents, graphics, and interactive PostScript "applets". HyperTIES browser and Gosling Emacs authoring tool with pie menus on the NeWS window system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy... >HyperTIES is an early hypermedia browser developed under the direction of Dr. Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab. This screen snapshot shows the HyperTIES authoring tool (built with UniPress's Gosling Emacs text editor, written in MockLisp) and browser (built with the NeWS window system, written in PostScript, C and Forth). The tabbed windows and pie menu reusable components were developed by Don Hopkins, who also developed the NeWS Emacs (NeMACS) and HyperTIES user interfaces. (Sorry about the quality -- this is a scan of an old screen dump printed by a laser printer.) Emacs provides the pie menus you see popped up in the illustration (Articulate, Edit, New (Storyboard, Link, Picture, Target), Define) that control the HyperTIES browser from the custom text editing mode of HyperTIES storyboards (like web pages), which the HyperTIES browser (in the background, which emacs controls in a sub-process) formats and displays. HyperTIES also uses pie menus for navigation and in interactive "applets" programmed in PostScript. DVRC on June 3, 2023 [–] Do any version of UniPress Emacs (that support the NeWS driver) or NeMacs survive? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31989423 I wrote the following description of how NeWS relates to modern web browsers and "AJAX" in the NeWS article on Wikipedia, and I also worked on TNT (The NeWS Toolkit) at Sun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS >NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently: >- used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming. >- used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering. >- used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation. [...] HyperTIES Emacs Authoring Tool MockLisp code (Yet Another HyperTIES Implementation, This Time In Emacs): http://donhopkins.com/home/ties/yahtittie.ml https://donhopkins.com/home/ties/ HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News: https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...
In Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks
homarp·Sep 26, 2020
you can read the threads on usenet at that time: March 20, 1985 is the launch of GNU emacs - first "clean" version of emacs is July 15, 1985 Fen Labalme message: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/net.emacs/Vxp_Is2A5Cs/l6AmKi... Unipress message about the "portions of the GNU Emacs program are most definitely not public domain" https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/net.emacs/ZmwEvkr9Jfs/... RMS explaining what code he used: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/net.emacs/eyFgYVrEe0Q/Avxp17... and then some more discussions: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/net.emacs/DRVCmoISBEU/efLdK-... https://groups.google.com/d/msg/net.emacs/PXHNtn7v4Rc/OFi1Ef... https://groups.google.com/d/msg/net.emacs/-2IaisY2N0Q/r4Fd9N... https://groups.google.com/d/msg/net.emacs/dytp5TT-02I/zUI4Ul... and one from GvR https://groups.google.com/d/msg/net.emacs/HJOjV7_2cyY/B
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m6oUm... https://groups.google.com/d/msg/net.emacs/ilF9KtBimCk/WwO5NS... has the cost of getting an EMACS tape from RMS "GNU Emacs can be obtained from anyone who has a copy or by sending $150 payable to me" On old emacs source code: https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history
In James Gosling: Java, JVM, Emacs, and Computing History [video]
bbanyc·Oct 14, 2019
The first public release of GNU Emacs was 13.1 in March 1985. In July 1985, 16.56 was released with (RMS claims) all of Gosling's code replaced with new implementations. So we're talking about four months here. I think Gosling is claiming that some of his own code was still in there, regardless of what RMS said he rewrote. Just from casually poking the source code I can scrounge up [1], it doesn't look like there's any Gosling code in GNU 16.56 or later versions. But there's a lot of code in there so who knows. As a side note, as late as 1995 [2] Unipress was still trying to sell its Gosling derivative starting at $395 a seat. It had a nice list of features, including "Demonstrably better than vi", but I bet it didn't let you psychoanalyze Zippy. [1]: https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history [2]: http://web.archive.org/web/199611250
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71933/http://www.unipres...
In James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]
tobias3·Oct 14, 2019
I found this copy of what seems to be the source code: https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history/blob/sources/... It has copyright notices everywhere (not that this matters). And following notice in Installation: Please remember that Emacs is copyrighted. You are free to use Emacs internally, but you are not free to redistribute it. If someone is interested in obtaining a copy of Emacs, refer them to me: So you are not allowed to redistribute it without written permission from the author. I also think back then redistributing source code was the "portable" way if redistributing programs and redistributing binaries wasn't feasible.
In James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]

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