The 50th Anniversary of the Birth of EMACS
The text editor EMACS has reached its 50th birthday, with the latest version being v31.1, released in August 2026. In 1976, when Richard Stallman visited the Stanford AI Lab, he saw the E editor; inspired, he returned to MIT and developed EMACS on top of the line editor TECO. The software-sharing community that formed around EMACS drove the modern free software movement and the birth of the GNU/Linux operating system.
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The text editor project EMACS has reached its 50th birthday. This project, which was born at the end of 1976, is still being updated today, with the latest version being v31.1, released in August 2026. In the early days of computing, the programming experience was completely different from today; programs at that time were not even written by hand. In 1946, six women took part in the development of the earliest computer, ENIAC, completing programming by configuring switches, cables, and plugboards. A few years later, MIT engineers programmed by punching holes in paper tape and then loading the tape into memory. Programmers in the 1960s used line editors to program on teletypewriters, entering only one line of code at a time. At that time, today's full-screen text editors did not yet exist. In 1976, Richard Stallman visited Stanford's AI Lab and saw the lab's E editor. Inspired by this, he returned to MIT's AI Lab and developed EMACS on the basis of the line editor Text Editor and Corrector (TECO). The software-sharing community that subsequently formed around EMACS drove the modern free software movement and the birth of the GNU/Linux operating system.