[TUHS] Tech Sq elevator (Was: screen editors)

[Doug McIlroy]

Mention of elevators at Tech Square reminds me of visiting there
to see the Lisp machine. I was struck by cultural differences.

At the time we were using Jerqs, where multiple windows ran
like multiple time-sharing sessions. To me that behavior was a
no-brainer. Surprisingly, Lisp-machine windows didn't work that
way; only the user-selected active window got processor time.

The biggest difference was emacs, which no one used at Bell
Labs. Emacs, of course was native to the Lisp machine and
provided a powerful and smoothly extensible environment. For
example, its reflective ability made it easy to display a
list of its commands. "Call elevator" stood out amng mundane
programmering actions like cut, paste and run.

After scrolling through the command list, I wondered how long
it was and asked to have it counted. Easy, I thought, just
pass it to a wc-like program. But "just pass it" and "wc-like"
were not givens as they are in Unix culture.  It took several
minutes for the gurus to do it--without leaving emacs, if I
remember right.

Doug