Such a wonderful writeup! I fondly remember reading this while writing an Emacs clone in Erlang ("Ermacs"), spending time with Hemlock under CMUCL, watching Climacs evolve for SBCL, etc.<p>Emacs has a rich history indeed with many other branches of the family tree than GNU Emacs.
> It was soon found that Emacs could be taught within minutes or an hour to those with no technical experience at all.<p>Wow. Nowadays the ability to use Emacs is considered one of the pinnacles of technical accomplishment.
It's interesting to read about the debate between doing editing/screen-drawing on the physical terminal ('smart' hardware) and doing it all in software. The wheel of reincarnation in action! Something we've seen in tech constantly, the balance between local vs distant computing determined by bandwidth/latency... Lately, smartphones, desktops and VR or sound: should the processing be done in the headphone/headset or away in in the PC/smartphone?