MIT Technology Review marks 50 years of EMACS, one of the first full-screen text editors and still in use today. It grew out of TECO, a text editor Dan Murphy wrote in 1962 for the PDP-1 at MIT, and Carl Mikkelsen’s Control-R add-on from 1971, which showed edits on video terminals as they happened.

In 1976, Richard Stallman saw a full-screen editor called E at Stanford and reworked Control-R so every key ran its own macro. Lab hackers then added commands of their own, which made helping each other hard. Guy Steele Jr. set out to standardize the command set, with David Moon and Stallman, producing the Meta key bindings that gave EMACS its name: Editor Macros.

Stallman mailed copies to anyone who sent a tape and a return envelope, on the condition that improvements came back. Commercial versions from Honeywell and from James Gosling followed, and that shift helped push Stallman to start the GNU Project.…