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Now, this was not the first Emacs that was written in C and ran on Unix. The first was written by James Gosling, and was referred to as GosMacs. A strange thing happened with him. In the beginning, he seemed to be influenced by the same spirit of sharing and cooperation of the original Emacs. I first released the original Emacs to people at MIT. Someone wanted to port it to run on Twenex — it originally only ran on the Incompatible Timesharing System we used at MIT. They ported it to Twenex, which meant that there were a few hundred installations around the world that could potentially use it. We started distributing it to them, with the rule that “you had to send back all of your improvements” so we could all benefit. No one ever tried to enforce that, but as far as I know people did cooperate.
Gosling did, at first, seem to participate in this spirit. He wrote in a manual that he called the program Emacs hoping that others in the community would improve it until it was worthy of that name. That's the right approach to take towards a community — to ask them to join in and make the program better. But after that he seemed to change the spirit, and sold it to a company.
At that time I was working on the GNU system (a free software Unix-like operating system that many people erroneously call “Linux”). There was no free software Emacs editor that ran on Unix. I did, however, have a friend who had participated in developing Gosling's Emacs. Gosling had given him, by email, permission to distribute his own version. He proposed to me that I use that version. Then I discovered that Gosling's Emacs did not have a real Lisp. It had a programming language that was known as ‘mocklisp’, which looks syntactically like Lisp, but didn't have the data structures of Lisp. So programs were not data, and vital elements of Lisp were missing. Its data structures were strings, numbers and a few other specialized things.
I concluded I couldn't use it and had to replace it all, the first step of which was to write an actual Lisp interpreter. I gradually adapted every part of the editor based on real Lisp data structures, rather than ad hoc data structures, making the data structures of the internals of the editor exposable and manipulable by the user's Lisp programs.
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