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1. Embed this notice
   Shannon Prickett (binder@petrous.vislae.town)'s status on Sunday, 26-Jul-2026 21:14:23 JST Shannon Prickett

   Reading "Because Emacs was built with Linux in mind...," & taking my glasses off to rub my nose & sigh.

   • Embed this notice
     tusharhero (tusharhero@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Sunday, 26-Jul-2026 21:14:19 JST tusharhero

     in reply to

     • Glyph
     • Andrew Wigglesworth
     • Daniel M. Reck

     @DanielMReck @ecadre @glyph *GNU* Emacs was written for the GNU Operating System, (which is *not* Linux (and Linux is not an operating system)). Maybe you should read more than Wikipedia articles, rude guy with Wikipedia links.

     翠星石 likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Andrew Wigglesworth (ecadre@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Jul-2026 21:14:20 JST Andrew Wigglesworth

     in reply to

     • Glyph

     @glyph Nope, the post had to be referring to GNU Emacs since this was the one written for the GNU operating system that was later combined with the Linux kernel.

     He had a rather mixed-up time-line.

   • Embed this notice
     Daniel M. Reck (danielmreck@mas.to)'s status on Sunday, 26-Jul-2026 21:14:20 JST Daniel M. Reck

     in reply to

     • Glyph
     • Andrew Wigglesworth

     @ecadre @glyph Well, the citations at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs suggest a 1976 date as the first development of Emacs.

     The citations at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux suggest Linus Torvalds enrolled in a Unix course in 1990 and during that course began to conceptualize the Linux kernel, which he released in 1991.

     If those dates are incorrect or I'm missing something about 1991 being "at least" 10 years after 1976, please let me know. Please also update the articles above with more citations as well as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics if appropriate to helping me understand those concepts better when writing absurdist replies to someone's facepalm post.

   • Embed this notice
     Daniel M. Reck (danielmreck@mas.to)'s status on Sunday, 26-Jul-2026 21:14:21 JST Daniel M. Reck

     in reply to

     • roland

     @roland @Binder It was profound foresight in the mid-70s to design software for an operating system that would not even be conceived of, let alone released, until at least a decade later.

     That requires developing functional understanding of a future project without anyone first conceiving or conceptualizing it, a truly innovative approach that upends conventional applications of feasible reality.

     This will be taught in #ComputerScience theory courses for generations to come.

     #Emacs #Linux #Unix #GNU

   • Embed this notice
     Andrew Wigglesworth (ecadre@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Jul-2026 21:14:21 JST Andrew Wigglesworth

     in reply to

     • Daniel M. Reck

     @DanielMReck GNU Emacs was written as a part of the GNU operating system, not for something that appeared 10 years later.

     Also, GNU Emacs was released in the early part of 1985, not in the 1970s.

     #emacs

   • Embed this notice
     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Jul-2026 21:14:21 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     • Andrew Wigglesworth
     • Daniel M. Reck

     @ecadre @DanielMReck GNU emacs was a relative latecomer to the party, and not the first Emacs written in Lisp — no matter how you slice it (rms, the name “emacs”, a lisp editor) developments were happening in the mid 70s: https://emacs.brause.cc/timeline.html

   • Embed this notice
     roland (roland@devdilettante.com)'s status on Sunday, 26-Jul-2026 21:14:22 JST roland

     in reply to

     @Binder lol i started using Emacs in 1988. Linux started in 1991 according to wikipedia :-) #GetOffMyLawnHistoryDeniers :-)

   • Embed this notice
     Alfred M. Szmidt (amszmidt@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 27-Jul-2026 04:29:06 JST Alfred M. Szmidt

     in reply to

     • Daniel M. Reck

     @DanielMReck I can confidently say that Emacs (any version, TECO, Lisp Machine or GNU) was never designed for any specific operating system.

     It was designed to be an editor.

     @Binder

   • Embed this notice
     Daniel M. Reck (danielmreck@mas.to)'s status on Monday, 27-Jul-2026 04:29:07 JST Daniel M. Reck

     in reply to

     • Glyph
     • Andrew Wigglesworth
     • tusharhero

     @tusharhero Looking back at the original post at https://petrous.vislae.town/@Binder/116981644135959252 there is no mention of *GNU* Emacs. It's a generic reference to Emacs, and it proposes that Emacs was designed for Linux.

     I read that as referring to the entire family of Emacs originating in 1976, not specifically GNU Emacs or any other particular later development, and judging from the rest of the dialog on that original thread, that seems to be a reasonable interpretation.

     As for whether Linux is an operating system, we could reasonably debate technical interpretations of the boundaries of what qualifies as an OS or family of OSes for days. In common parlance, Linux (or GNU/Linux if you prefer) is understood by the general public as an operating system, and that's more than adequate when writing a snarky reply intended to elevate the already humorous facepalm post from @Binder.

     I apologize that I came across to you as rude. I only intended to document how I arrived at my understanding.

     @ecadre @glyph

   • Embed this notice
     Daniel M. Reck (danielmreck@mas.to)'s status on Monday, 27-Jul-2026 04:29:07 JST Daniel M. Reck

     in reply to

     FWIW, my original post referred to "an operating system," which could mean literally any operating system that was developed more than 10 years after 1976.

     In context the @Binder post I was replying to, it's reasonable to assume I would be talking about any Linux distro that meets the minimum qualifications of being an "operating system."

     For the purposes of the snark, any L i n u x - b a s e d o p e r a t i n g s y s t e m will do, since NONE of them existed in 1976 when Emacs was first designed and released.

     So take your pick: Linus' first boot-root distro would work. Or the original MCC, TAMU, or SLS distros. Perhaps the joke works better with Slackware or Debian. Snark doesn't compile for Arch, unfortunately. #IUseMintBTW
     
     
     Has this horse been sufficiently beaten?

   • Embed this notice
     Alfred M. Szmidt (amszmidt@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 27-Jul-2026 04:46:10 JST Alfred M. Szmidt

     in reply to

     • Glyph
     • Andrew Wigglesworth
     • Daniel M. Reck
     • tusharhero

     @tusharhero Total and utter nonsense.

     GNU Emacs was written to run on whatever Unix existed in the early 1980s.

     Maybe you should listen to hackers that were around that time.

     @DanielMReck @ecadre @glyph

   • Embed this notice
     Andrew Wigglesworth (ecadre@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 27-Jul-2026 04:55:08 JST Andrew Wigglesworth

     in reply to

     • Alfred M. Szmidt

     @amszmidt Nope, all I need to refer to is Richard Stallman, who did not write GNU Emacs to run on UNIX but the GNU (Gnus Not Unix) Operating system.

   • Embed this notice
     Alfred M. Szmidt (amszmidt@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 27-Jul-2026 04:57:28 JST Alfred M. Szmidt

     in reply to

     • Andrew Wigglesworth

     @ecadre sweetie, the GNU system didn’t existed when RMS wrote GNU Emacs. *plonk*

   • Embed this notice
     Alfred M. Szmidt (amszmidt@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 27-Jul-2026 04:58:58 JST Alfred M. Szmidt

     in reply to

     • Andrew Wigglesworth
     • Daniel M. Reck

     @ecadre No, TECO Emacs was NOT written specifically for ITS — it ran on other systems.

     *plonk*

     @DanielMReck

   • Embed this notice
     Andrew Wigglesworth (ecadre@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 27-Jul-2026 04:58:59 JST Andrew Wigglesworth

     in reply to

     • Daniel M. Reck

     @DanielMReck EMACS (note the upper-case letters) was a set of macros written for the TECO text editor in the 1970s.

     It was written for the ITS operating system. TECO was its editor. It was not to designed to run on any other operating system and is in no way programmatically the root of GNU Emacs.

     GNU Emacs was written to be a part of the GNU Operating system, not in 1976 but starting in 1984/5. It didn't magically fit into a future operating system, it was a part of it from the beginning.

   • Embed this notice
     Alfred M. Szmidt (amszmidt@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 27-Jul-2026 05:02:28 JST Alfred M. Szmidt

     in reply to

     • Andrew Wigglesworth

     @ecadre I suggest you read the thesis on EMACS before continuing the discussion.