"That's the idea
that we wanted to convey," says Stallman. "The amount
of stuff it has contained within it is both wonderful
and awful at the same time."
Stallman's AI Lab contemporaries are more charitable.
Hal Abelson, an MIT grad student who worked with
Stallman during the 1970s and would later assist
Stallman as a charter boardmember of the Free Software
Foundation, describes Emacs as "an absolutely brilliant
creation." In giving programmers a way to add new
software libraries and features without messing up the
system, Abelson says, Stallman paved the way for future
large-scale collaborative software projects. "Its
structure was robust enough that you'd have people all
over the world who were loosely collaborating [and]
contributing to it," Abelson says. "I don't know if
that had been done before."In writing this chapter, I've elected to focus more
on
the social significance of Emacs than the software
significance. To read more about the software side, I
recommend Stallman's 1979 memo.
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