[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.