z (04/17/83)
Since the question has arisen, I thought I should clarify the pricing policies for CCA EMACS. The price for a single CPU license is $850; additional CPU's are $680 each. For machines designed to support four or fewer users, the price is $475 for the first CPU and $380 for each additional CPU. Educational institutions get a flat $350 rate for each CPU of any type. These are full source licenses. Although CCA EMACS doesn't yet have an extension language, the existing keyboard macro library facility is quite powerful. For example, one of users has used it to make his EMACS automatically come up looking just like EDT. Nevertheless, there is no substitute for a full extension language, and such a language is in the works. It will be a true small Lisp, including such niceties as garbage collection. A large amount of work has already been done on it, although not much since our marketing department took over direction of EMACS a few months ago. They plan to continue funding the extension language as soon as EMACS starts generating revenue, which should be very soon as we are about to start shipping out tapes. The priority that the extension language gets depends on the demand that our marketing department perceives exists for it. If you would be interested in buying CCA EMACS if it had an extension language, please send me a message saying so. If I can deliver a whole pile of such messages to our marketing department, I assure you that they will become very interested in getting the extension language finished and out the door soon. We do not intend to raise the price of CCA EMACS once the extension language is released. For existing CCA EMACS customers, it will be available at the normal update charge of $300; this one charge will cover all currently licensed CPU's. As some people know, actual distribution of CCA EMACS has been held up for several months by our legal department, who was taking all this time drawing up the licenses. They finally finished the licenses on Friday, and we have begun mailing them out. There's quite a backlog, so it may take a couple of weeks to get forms to everyone who requested them. However, the major bottleneck has been cleared, so tapes should be going out soon to all who want them. Steve Zimmerman decvax!cca!z z@cca