| How I contributed to Emacs Once when I should've been in college still, I was using the Telix terminal program on a 286 with a 2400MNP5 modem. Now Telix had a really awesome scripting language that could do all sorts of terminal magic, but that's a story for another day. My connection to the Internet was 8-bit clean, and at the time I was an avid Emacs user/evangelist. (Since then, I have seen the light of vim's face and have never turned away.) I saw that Emacs included a mapping file for mskermit to generate ESC sequences for Alt+Keypress, and I figured out that if I mapped each scancode for Alt+Keypress to the appropriate 8-bit code, it would convert my Alt key into a Meta buckybit, perfect for Emacs usage! So I painstakingly mapped out each scancode and transcribed it into the ms-kermit configuration, and before long I was Emacsing in all its 8-bit-meta-glory. I figured it would be useful to other Emacs users, and so I sent the file upstream. Lo and behold, it was incorporated into the standard Emacs distribution, and it stayed that way for a long, long time. Unfortunately, since I had never formally assigned copyright or done whatever legal bit needs to be done to GPL the code, TPTB did an audit of the Emacs distro and culled any code that did not have solid legal footing. At that point, ms-kermit was really obsolete anyway, so I suppose it's all for the best! |