I'm not sure to what extent this is common knowledge, but while looking around for something else I came across
http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/s1.html which includes quotes from Richard Stallman about how he started off with a Pascal compiler from Lawrence Livermore Lab when writing GCC. This is possibly the most interesting bit:

"I didn't really know much about optimizing compilers at the time, because I'd never worked on one. But I got my hands on a compiler, that I was told at the time was free. It was a compiler called PASTEL, which the authors say means ``off-color PASCAL''.

"Pastel was a very complicated language including features such as parametrized types and explicit type parameters and many complicated things. The compiler was of course written in this language, and had many complicated features to optimize the use of these things. For example: the type ``string'' in that language was a parameterized type; you could say ``string(n)'' if you wanted a string of a particular length; you could also just say ``string'', and the parameter would be determined from the context. Now, strings are very important, and it is necessary for a lot of constructs that use them to run fast, and this means that they had to have a lot of features to detect such things as: when the declared length of a string is an argument that is known to be constant throughout the function, to save to save the value and optimize the code they're going to produce, many complicated things. But I did get to see in this compiler how to do automatic register allocation, and some ideas about how to handle different sorts of machines."

And then went on to write the abomination called EMACS...

---
This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. http://www.avast.com

In our previous episode, Ralf Quint said:

And then went on to write the abomination called EMACS...

Well, EMACS is a great OS, it's just a shame that the editor sucks :-)

Marco van de Voort wrote

In our previous episode, Ralf Quint said: > And then went on to write the abomination called EMACS... Well, EMACS is a great OS, it's just a shame that the editor sucks :-)

APPLAUSE!!!!

i've played many a game written for EMACS but have never been able to operate it as a simple text editor when in the heat of things... have always had to revert to vi or joe or something else...

I used Emacs on Multics years ago. It was really no worse than the mainframe editors I was used to.

The old joke about Emacs being a competent operating system: it's curious how relevant that one still is, with numerous people saying "I've written a new OS" when in actual fact all they've done is put a thin skin on top of a standard kernel.