The macro feature, after its second year, began to foil this capability. In their eagerness to embrace the new full-screen capabilities, hackers had customized their versions of TECO to the point where a hacker sitting down at another hacker’s terminal usually had to spend the first hour just figuring out what macro commands did what.
Frustrated, Steele took it upon himself to the solve the problem. He gathered together the four different macro packages and began assembling a chart documenting the most useful macro commands. In the course of implementing the design specified by the chart, Steele says he attracted Stallman’s attention.
“He started looking over my shoulder, asking me what I was doing”, recalls Steele.
For Steele, a soft-spoken hacker who interacted with Stallman infrequently, the memory still sticks out. Looking over another hacker’s shoulder while he worked was a common activity at the AI Lab. Stallman, the TECO maintainer at the lab, deemed Steele’s work “interesting” and quickly set off to complete it.
“As I like to say, I did the first 0.001 percent of the implementation, and Stallman did the rest”, says Steele with a laugh.
The project’s new name, Emacs, came courtesy of Stallman. Short for “editing macros”, it signified the evolutionary transcendence that had taken place during the macros explosion two years before. It also took advantage of a gap in the software programming lexicon. Noting a lack of programs on ITS starting with the letter “E”, Stallman chose Emacs, making it possible to reference the program with a single letter. Once again, the hacker lust for efficiency had left its mark.[6]
In the course of developing a standard system of macro commands, Stallman and Steele had to traverse a political tightrope. In creating a standard program, Stallman was in clear violation of the fundamental hacker tenet-“promote decentralization”. He was also threatening to hobble the very flexibility that had fueled TECO’s explosive innovation in the first place.
“On the one hand, we were trying to make a uniform command set again; on the other hand, we wanted to keep it open ended, because the programmability was important”, recalls Steele.
To solve the problem, Stallman, Steele, and fellow hackers David Moon and Dan Weinreib limited their standardization effort to the WYSIWYG commands that controlled how text appeared on-screen. The rest of the Emacs effort would be devoted to retaining the program’s Tinker Toy-style extensibility.
Stallman now faced another conundrum: if users made changes but didn’t communicate those changes back to the rest of the community, the Tower of Babel effect would simply emerge in other places. Falling back on the hacker doctrine of sharing innovation, Stallman embedded a statement within the source code that set the terms of use. Users were free to modify and redistribute the code on the condition that they gave back all the extensions they made. Stallman dubbed it the “Emacs Commune”. Just as TECO had become more than a simple editor, Emacs had become more than a simple software program. To Stallman, it was a social contract. In an early memo documenting the project, Stallman spelled out the contract terms. “EMACS”, he wrote, “was distributed on a basis of communal sharing, which means that all improvements must be given back to me to be incorporated and distributed”.[7]
Not everybody accepted the contract. The explosive innovation continued throughout the decade, resulting in a host of Emacs-like programs with varying degrees of cross-compatibility. A few cited their relation to Stallman’s original Emacs with humorously recursive names: Sine (Sine is not Emacs), Eine (Eine is not Emacs), and Zwei (Zwei was Eine initially). As a devoted exponent of the hacker ethic, Stallman saw no reason to halt this innovation through legal harassment. Still, the fact that some people would so eagerly take software from the community chest, alter it, and slap a new name on the resulting software displayed a stunning lack of courtesy.
Such rude behavior was reflected against other, unsettling developments in the hacker community. Brian Reid’s 1979 decision to embed “time bombs” in Scribe, making it possible for Unilogic to limit unpaid user access to the software, was a dark omen to Stallman. “He considered it the most Nazi thing he ever saw in his life”, recalls Reid. Despite going on to later Internet fame as the cocreator of the Usenet alt heirarchy, Reid says he still has yet to live down that 1979 decision, at least in Stallman’s eyes. “He said that all software should be free and the prospect of charging money for software was a crime against humanity”.[8]
Although Stallman had been powerless to head off Reid’s sale, he did possess the ability to curtail other forms of behavior deemed contrary to the hacker ethos. As central source-code maintainer for the Emacs “commune”, Stallman began to wield his power for political effect. During his final stages of conflict with the administrators at the Laboratory for Computer Science over password systems, Stallman initiated a software “strike”,[9] refusing to send lab members the latest version of Emacs until they rejected the security system on the lab’s computers. The move did little to improve Stallman’s growing reputation as an extremist, but it got the point across: commune members were expected to speak up for basic hacker values.
“A lot of people were angry with me, saying I was trying to hold them hostage or blackmail them, which in a sense I was”, Stallman would later tell author Steven Levy. “I was engaging in violence against them because I thought they were engaging in violence to everyone at large”.[9]
Over time, Emacs became a sales tool for the hacker ethic. The flexibility Stallman and built into the software not only encouraged collaboration, it demanded it. Users who didn’t keep abreast of the latest developments in Emacs evolution or didn’t contribute their contributions back to Stallman ran the risk of missing out on the latest breakthroughs. And the breakthroughs were many. Twenty years later, users had modified Emacs for so many different uses-using it as a spreadsheet, calculator, database, and web browser-that later Emacs developers adopted an overflowing sink to represent its versatile functionality. “That’s the idea that we wanted to convey”, says Stallman. “The amount of stuff it has contained within it is both wonderful and awful at the same time”.
Stallman’s AI Lab contemporaries are more charitable. Hal Abelson, an MIT grad student who worked with Stallman during the 1970s and would later assist Stallman as a charter boardmember of the Free Software Foundation, describes Emacs as “an absolutely brilliant creation”. In giving programmers a way to add new software libraries and features without messing up the system, Abelson says, Stallman paved the way for future large-scale collaborative software projects. “Its structure was robust enough that you’d have people all over the world who were loosely collaborating [and] contributing to it”, Abelson says. “I don’t know if that had been done before”.[10]
Guy Steele expresses similar admiration. Currently a research scientist for Sun Microsystems, he remembers Stallman primarily as a “brilliant programmer with the ability to generate large quantities of relatively bug-free code”. Although their personalities didn’t exactly mesh, Steele and Stallman collaborated long enough for Steele to get a glimpse of Stallman’s intense coding style. He recalls a notable episode in the late 1970s when the two programmers banded together to write the editor’s “pretty print” feature. Originally conceived by Steele, pretty print was another keystroke-triggerd feature that reformatted Emacs’ source code so that it was both more readable and took up less space, further bolstering the program’s WYSIWIG qualities. The feature was strategic enough to attract Stallman’s active interest, and it wasn’t long before Steele wrote that he and Stallman were planning an improved version.
8.
In a 1996 interview with online magazine
10.
In writing this chapter, I’ve elected to focus more on the social significance of Emacs than the software significance. To read more about the software side, I recommend Stallman’s 1979 memo. I particularly recommend the section titled “Research Through Development of Installed Tools” (#SEC27). Not only is it accessible to the nontechnical reader, it also sheds light on how closely intertwined Stallman’s political philosophies are with his software-design philosophies. A sample excerpt follows:
EMACS could not have been reached by a process of careful design, because such processes arrive only at goals which are visible at the outset, and whose desirability is established on the bottom line at the outset. Neither I nor anyone else visualized an extensible editor until I had made one, nor appreciated its value until he had experienced it. EMACS exists because I felt free to make individually useful small improvements on a path whose end was not in sight.