Mikkelson's hack had raised TECO to the level of a
WYSIWYG editor. Stallman's hack had raised it to the
level of a user-programmable WYSIWYG editor. "That was
the real breakthrough," says Guy Steele, a fellow AI
Lab hacker at the time.
By Stallman's own recollection, the macro hack touched
off an explosion of further innovation. "Everybody and
his brother was writing his own collection of redefined
screen-editor commands, a command for everything he
typically liked to do," Stallman would later recall.
"People would pass them around and improve them, making
them more powerful and more general. The collections of
redefinitions gradually became system programs in their
own right."
So many people found the macro innovations useful and
had incorporated it into their own TECO programs that
the TECO editor had become secondary to the macro mania
it inspired. "We started to categorize it mentally as a
programming language rather than as an editor,"
Stallman says. Users were experiencing their own
pleasure tweaking the software and trading new ideas.
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