warren@ihnss.UUCP (06/14/83)
My appologies to those who could care less about emacs, but I feel that an explaination of the status of my immitation emacs editor is in order in light of Steve Zimmerman's posting to these groups. First of all, if you are in the Bell System, then none of this applies to you. My emacs is still available for free. You should be aware, however, that it is not to be distributed outside or taken away on a tape of all of your favorite software when you leave the company. Unfortuantely, someone in the past did just that. Copies of my emacs got around in a surprizing number of places, and the owners of those copies were sometimes not aware that it was never released by Bell Labs. Nobody noticed much in the past, since Bell Labs took no official interest in my editor. Recent hightened awareness of the value of proprietary software within Bell Labs and CCA's attempt to market their product brought our lawyers into the picture. If you have a copy of my emacs (can be recognized by my name in the users manual or by a low version number with a decimal point) and you are not in the Bell System, you have a pirate copy. There is still some chance that Bell Labs (or whoever) will make it available for sale legally at a reasonable liscence fee. It does offer a reasonable set of features for a small system (pdp-11) editor. Don't hold your breath, though. If you are really interested, send me mail. My sincerest appologies to anyone inconvenienced by this situation, but I was not at all aware of the extent of distribution of pirate copies of my emacs or of CCA emacs until quite recently. I wrote emacs as a tool for my own work and it got wide distribution and acceptance within Bell Labs. It is not a part of the unix product and is not officially supported at this point by anyone. -- Warren Montgomery ihnss!warren IH x2494