Over at the Emacs subreddit, FirmSupermarket6933 asks who really created Emacs. He cites various sources claiming that RMS did or did not create it. Is he responsible only for GNU Emacs or was he there from the beginning? Sadly the commenters purporting to answer his question have no more idea than FirmSupermarket6933 about the editor’s origin.

All of this was long ago and far away but almost everyone who has a reasonable grasp of Emacs’ history agree on some basic facts:

• Emacs began circa 1976 as a set of macros for the TECO editor. That’s where the macs in “Emacs” comes from. The origin of the E is more controversial. Some say it stands for “Editing” but Stallman and others say it was chosen for more pragmatic reasons.
• Stallman was heavily involved from the beginning. Guy Steele has produced some email threads that show this definitively.
• Many others including Steele, David Moon, and James Gosling were instrumental in moving the effort forward. The end of this process is what we now know as GNU Emacs

Even the original effort was more curation than invention. The original TECO macros were collected from the macros that people in the AI Lab were using. The idea was to have a standard set of macros that everyone could use. Even so, there was a surprising amount of work to get everything working. See Steele’s email threads for the details.

All of this began almost 50 years ago so memories are dim and, sadly, many of the principals are nearing the end of their lives so it’s important to get these facts right while we can.