[gazonk]

It all started in the early eighties. Just got into the university and the machine was a PDP-10 (tops20) and the only option as I remember was Emacs. Has been using it since. Not so much after the introduction of IDEs. But will totally lost for general file editing if there was no Emacs in Linux distrubtions. Hard to grasp? Maybe but for me it was the first thing I learnt and most likely will end with.

[dctoedt]

And Brian Reid's Scribe formatter [0] — so much nicer than roff, troff, etc. (descendants of Runoff). In 1981-82 I wrote a user manual and taught my fellow law-review editors — none of whom were computer people — how to use both Emacs and Scribe (PDP-11 / TOPS20). It was a real boon, freeing up our paid secretary from having to repeatedly retype manuscripts after we'd edited them, and cutting down on printer errors that had to be hand-corrected on galley proofs.

[0] https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA125287.pdf (Brian Reid's CMU Ph.D dissertation a.k.a. a manual for Scribe).