Re:Emacs Rocks
by gumby on Sunday November 16, 2014 @06:09PM
(#8615907)
> The Meta key is called the "Meta key" because that's the label that was on the keyboards of the Lisp machines in the MIT AI lab when Emacs was first developed.
You have your cause and effect backwards. TL;DR: The Lispm's bucky keyboard simply extended existing practice.
Emacs predates the Lisp machines (CADRs in this case), and was originally written in TECO. Originally escape escape would open and close a minibuffer in which you could simply enter raw TECO. The Knight TV system had a custom keyboard used by us at MIT AI (and at Stanford AI for their own, slightly different TV system) had a Meta key which was used to invoke the minubuffer with a single keystroke (meta-altmode, mapped to escape when using ASCII) which later turned into direct "long" commands (M-X commands) and a wider keyspace.
In those days most programs on the PDP-6 & PDP-10 used six or seven bit bytes (though byte pointers could stride by 1-18 bit bytes) but the KTV was built on a PDP-11 which had 8 bit bytes, so meta was trivially available. FWIW the PDP-11 was memory mapped into the 36-bit PDP-6 through an arcane process I have thankfully forgotten.
You have your cause and effect backwards. TL;DR: The Lispm's bucky keyboard simply extended existing practice.
Emacs predates the Lisp machines (CADRs in this case), and was originally written in TECO. Originally escape escape would open and close a minibuffer in which you could simply enter raw TECO. The Knight TV system had a custom keyboard used by us at MIT AI (and at Stanford AI for their own, slightly different TV system) had a Meta key which was used to invoke the minubuffer with a single keystroke (meta-altmode, mapped to escape when using ASCII) which later turned into direct "long" commands (M-X commands) and a wider keyspace.
In those days most programs on the PDP-6 & PDP-10 used six or seven bit bytes (though byte pointers could stride by 1-18 bit bytes) but the KTV was built on a PDP-11 which had 8 bit bytes, so meta was trivially available. FWIW the PDP-11 was memory mapped into the 36-bit PDP-6 through an arcane process I have thankfully forgotten.