[lispm]

Neither Emacs nor the control/meta keys were invented on Lisp Machines. Emacs was written in TECO on DEC's PDP machines.

The control/meta keys actually date back to Professor Wirth at Stanford. The Stanford keyboard had control/meta then. MIT then had it in the form of the Knight keyboard.

http://www.lysator.liu.se/hackdict/split/bucky_bits.html

[DonHopkins]

Double Bucky

(C) 1978 by Guy L. Steele, Jr.

(Sung to the tune of "Rubber Duckie")

    Double bucky, you're the one!
    You make my keyboard lots of fun
      Double bucky, an additional bit or two:
    (Vo-vo-de-o!)
    Control and Meta side by side,
    Augmented ASCII, nine bits wide!
      Double bucky, a half a thousand glyphs,
               plus a few!
        Oh,
        I sure wish that I
        Had a couple of
            bits more!
        Perhaps a
        Set of pedals to
        Make the number of
            Bits four:
        Double double bucky!
    Double bucky, left and right
    OR'd together, outta sight!
        Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of
        Double bucky, I'm happy I heard of
        Double bucky, I'd like a whole
            word of you!

(For those of you who are interested, the term "bucky bits" comes from Niklaus Wirth, known as "bucky" to friends, who suggested that an extra bit be added to terminal codes on 36 bit machines for use by screen editors.)

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/double-bucky.html

[kps]

Control as a modifier key (not a bucky bit) certainly predates that, if the dates in the link are correct.