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Thanks for the first article.

“Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it.”

This reminds me of a story I heard that early on at Amazon supposedly the company used applications built onto Emacs instead of building in-house web applications for internal use. I had a chance to talk with an early employee but unfortunately forgot to ask about it.




You are likely thinking of this Steve Yegge essay:

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel

Search for "Then you know Mailman", and you'll find the bit I'm thinking of.

It doesn't say they built multiple systems around Emacs, but it does say Mailman was built in Emacs Lisp, and that they had people writing Emacs extensions to further Mailman's functionality.

(And that their non-technical customer service folks loved Mailman.)

Edit: found more-canonical URL.




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