[gumby]

> As someone who’s not a developer nor a full-time product person

Emacs was famously used by “secretaries” (as they were referred to in those days) not only to write documents and mail but to write macros to make their lives simpler. Of course none of them could “program” (which was considered quite intimidating) but they didn’t consider writing Emacs macros to be “programming”.

Back then Emacs was written in TECO so writing actual libraries was pretty arcane and not as easy as it is today.

But I’m glad the learned helplessness around programming has largely ablated, in part through improved tools and in part through simple acceptance.

[dctoedt]

> Emacs was famously used by “secretaries”

As a law student in 1980-81, I wrote a custom user manual for the law review editors and our admin to use Emacs and Brian Reid's Scribe formatter (on the Computer Science Department's TOPS-20 machine using a VT-100 terminal over a 9600 bps line). I was the only even-remotely technical person on the editorial board, but even so, we were all in heaven: Once manuscripts were typed into Emacs / Scribe by our admin, we didn't have to literally cut, paste, hand-mark, retype, etc., on paper as the editing process progressed. And it speeded up the production process because we sent "clean" edited manuscripts to the printer, as opposed to manuscripts with significant pen-and-ink proofreader marks; this dramatically reduced the time we spent reading and correcting galley proofs. (Electronic transmission to the printer was next on the experiment list but we graduated and left.) I'm sure that's why I've been an Emacs user ever since, and wrote keyboard emulators for WordPerfect and MS Word.

[p_l]

The version that was used by secretaries in that story was programmed in Lisp, MACLISP for Multics specifically, and extended in Lisp.

[gumby]

I would be surprised if that were the case as the secretaries in tech square were using it on the PDP-10.

But its very possible -- I never interacted with any non-programmer Multics users.

[p_l]

The AI ITS machines I think weren't used by non-technical users much, the TOPS-20 machines might be, but the anecdote I heard was always in context of Multics, which had much more explicit time sharing story behind it (with computing as utility).

[gumby]

I don’t know why you say that — the ITS machines were used by everybody in 545 tech square, researchers, admins and “secretaries” alike (both AI and LCS), from when I was there until they were gradually retired. The one TOPS-20 machine, Oz, didn’t arrive until times had changed and a lot of alternatives were already in use.

As for time sharing: ITS stands for “Incompatible Timesharing System” (a joke on CTSS), with memory protection, etc used by multiple users on terminals and over the net starting around/before the Multics project (all of which preceded Emacs of course)

[p_l]

Multics was also at 545 tech square, from 1967 to 1988.

ITS version 1 is counted from 1967 as well (first mentions of PDP-6 ITS), simply because Project MAC couldn't deliver computing resources needed by other groups, not to mention AI Lab tended to modify the hw all the time (a fate AFAIK common to all ITS systems).

The anecdote about secretaries extending Emacs came from RMS, describing a group that used the shared "utility" computing resources provided by Project MAC (later turned into LCS) and who used a manual that didn't mention the word programming, compiled by who-knows-who, which showed how to modify Multics Emacs (which was the second Lisp-based Emacs) to user's liking.