No lesser authority than the MIT Technology Review says that the Emacs editor has turned 50 years old. But then, it is biased — Emacs was invented in MIT's AI lab.

Simson Garfinkel's article is simply called EMACS turns 50, but the sub-heading explains why it matters more:

"How the MIT AI Lab's text editor gave birth to the free software movement."

There are multiple timelines and accounts of the origins of Emacs, and it is not a single monolithic application. The name is an abbreviation for " E diting MAC ro S ", and the original editor for which this set of macros was developed was TECO – "Text Editor and COrrector," written by Dan Murphy in 1962. Murphy died earlier this year at the age of 83.

The inimitable Jamie Zawinski has an encyclopedic Emacs Timeline – as he mentions at the start, his interest being that he long ago maintained a fork of GNU Emacs, originally called Lucid Emacs . It's still around, under its later name XEmacs.…