Programming has evolved dramatically since the 1940s. The first programmers, including six women working on the ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946, configured switches and cables rather than writing code. Over the decades, methods progressed from paper tape to punch cards to interactive line editors on teletypes. By the early 1960s, programmers used line editors on noisy keyboard-and-printer machines, saving work on spinning hard disks the size of washing machines. Full-screen text editors were still unheard of.
One of the first such tools, EMACS, turns 50 this year and remains widely used. It first ran on video terminals at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1976, though its roots trace back to the TECO text editor created by Dan Murphy in 1962 for MIT's PDP-1 computer. TECO's commands were uppercase letters—"I" to insert, "D" to delete—and evolved into a full programming language for creating macros.
In 1971, Carl Mikkelsen developed Control-R, an add-on that displayed edits in real-time on video terminals. Richard M. Stallman later expanded Control-R at MIT's AI Lab, making every key customizable via macros. Guy Steele and David Moon helped standardize commands using the Meta key, creating EMACS ("Editor Macros"). Beyond its technical innovations, the software-sharing community around EMACS helped launch the free software movement and GNU/Linux.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing