23: Where does the name "Emacs" come from? Emacs originally was an acronym for Editor MACroS. RMS says he "picked the name Emacs because `E' was not in use as an abbreviation on ITS at the time." The first Emacs was a set of macros written in 1976 at MIT by RMS for the editor TECO (Text Editor and COrrector, originally Tape Editor and COrrector) under ITS on a PDP-10. RMS had already extended TECO with a "real-time" full screen mode with active keys. Emacs was started by Guy Steele <gls@think.com> as a project to unify the many divergent TECO command sets and key bindings at MIT. Many people have said that TECO code looks a lot like line noise. See alt.lang.teco if you are interested. Someone has written a TECO implementation in Emacs Lisp (to find it, see question 87); it would be an interesting project to run the original TECO Emacs inside of Emacs. For some not-so-serious alternative reasons for Emacs to have that name, check out etc/JOKES (see question 4).