This is a long tale, not confined to Emacs alone. This is, indeed, a story about why I am a confirmed Free Software advocate. This has been a rocky road. For this chapter, I'll try my best to restrict my discussion to Emacs; but that's impossible. In the late 80s and early 90s, I was living in Chuuk Lagoon, Micronesia. Graduate work at the University of Guam (UOG) marine lab had been interrupted, at the outset of my third year; in Chuuk, my wife was preparing to give birth to our first son.
In my letter of intent for my application to the graduate program at UOG Marine Lab, in 1984, I had written that my first order of business was to learn the marine fauna of Micronesia, to prepare for future study of traditional marine biological knowledge. A lexicon of marine life would be required. After two years of classwork, with a working knowledge of the fauna, in late 1986 I hit the ground running, collecting notes on the names and knowledge of marine animals.
As notes piled up, I would obviously need a PC to compile, sort, and analyze the burgeoning information. I had a working knowledge of computers, and had used some of the earliest PCs---IBM XT and IBM AT--- at the Marine Lab. Somehow I acquired a PC, and started messing around with typing in names, and organizing the data. I purchased a copy of SNOBOL4, and began to study it, and SPITBOL, hopeful it would be helpful for string manipulation. I tried Borland Paradox. Progress was minimal.
In 1990 and 1991, my life in turmoil I moved to another island, nearby. My Mother came to the rescue, gifting me a Toshiba laptop. I soon realized it came with no software, not even a word processor. I made do for a while. I remember using 4Dos.
In 1991, I had remarried, moved again, and had a new teaching job. With a 10W solar panel, the laptop could be used, and I tried various editors to develop a simple database---a list of animal names with descriptive text. I needed a programmer's editor that did not mangle the text with control codes. A linguist from the University of Hawaii sent a demonstration copy of MultiEdit, which did some of what I wanted. But to learn how to type diacritics, I would need to purchase the manual, for over 300.00. On my teacher's salary, this was impossible.
At the time, I had been reading Infoworld, and , ran across a short article buried a few pages in, about the Free Software Foundation. I knew nothing about this, or about Free Software, but the name said it all. I wrote a letter to the FSF explaining my project, and asking for help for an editor. A few weeks later, I received a package with about 13 3-1/2" diskettes, a package that would change my life. (Whom should I thank?) On one disk was "Demacs," an implementation of Emacs for the Windows ecosystem, in addition to a number of Unix text tools ported to Windows, by Cygwin, and Unix Text Tools---sort, ptx, grep, find, and other---ported for Windows 3.0.
Demacs was a well-functioning port of Emacs to Windows. One of the first things I noticed was the existence of a Tutorial, a genius introduction. And this was the "self documenting text editor." Within minutes I was sufficiently able to navigate the interface and to work with text. I developed a crude understanding of Emacs Lisp, and wrote several low level helper functions for my needs. This software was beyond any dream.
Shockingly, in this age of continual modernization, most of the tweaks I developed to my first emacs files still function on today's Emacs 30+, in 2026, not the case for files written on early windows Word versions. Happily, over the next couple of years, the Gnus Bull, the bulletin of the Free Software Foundation arrived every so often in my post office box. In one of these bulletins, fascinating reading for me at the time, was an article about Unix work-alike operating systems, Linux and FreeBSD. Later on, on an extended medical visit to Guam, I was able, through generous assistance of the owners of the ISP Kuentos Communications, I was enabled to download Slackware and install it on my Toshiba Laptop.
This meant I could install Emacs directly. The Unix text tools were available directly as well. My needs are simple, compared to many---if not most---Emacs users, many of whom are programmers comfortable with generating elaborate and extensive code. As my project grew, Emacs was the essential ingredient. Later on I learned of the existence of LaTeX. Eventually, my lexicon was published from camera ready copy generated by LaTeX in the journal Micronesica. With the help of a programmer at the University of Hawaii Linguistics Department, an Emacs guru, I was able to write an emacs lisp program to "alphabetize" Chuukese in an arbitrary order. Many other scholars and programmers have helped along the way, on mailing lists, or through lengthy correspondences. Early on, Professor Hsu at UH mentioned the Band Format---a free form database used by linguists for lexical data. I could not afford the tools he offered, but I was able to mimic some of the needed facility using Emacs lisp.
I was able to implement a tool to convert each record of the band format database into LaTeX code for a single entry, that was typeset as camera ready copy for the ultimate publication.
For this carnival, the take home messages for Newbies and scholars was that the Tutorial can provide, in an hour or two, a tremendous introduction to the keyboard use for Emacs. And secondly, I think it's important to recognize the number of Emacs experts who are willing to assist in such an endeavor as mine. I have not resorted to a starter kit.
