What a deeply strange article. It starts out deep in the details of Emacs' origins, then suddenly gives up, fast forwards and ends with a whimper.

ps. My first sight of the author was in a basement lab at the Weizmann Institute in 1986, sitting cross-legged on a chair working in front of the then-wondrous brand new Sun workstations - the so-called "3M standard" (1MB of RAM, 1MHz CPU, 1M pixels). Good times but old times!