“EMACS first ran on the early video terminals at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1976, but its core concepts were so powerful that it was rewritten for many operating systems in the decades that followed. Apple even distributed it with Mac OS X. Beyond that, the software-­sharing community that started around EMACS helped give rise to the modern-day free software movement and the GNU/Linux operating system. EMACS’s roots begin with the TECO text editor (originally the “Tape Editor and Corrector”) that Dan Murphy ’65 created in 1962 for the pioneering PDP-1 computer at MIT. The program’s commands were uppercase letters: A user would type “I” to insert text, “D” to delete a character, and so on. When tape gave way as a storage medium to files on a huge shared disk, the “T” in “TECO” came to stand for “Text.” And as years passed, TECO became a full language that programmers could use to create new commands, called macros, for editing their code.” https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/10/20/1145399/emacs-turns-50 #EMACS #TextEditors #OpenSource #MIT #SoftwareHistory #ComputerHistory