How I got into Emacs (and Free Software)

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 marine lab had been interrupted, at the outset of my third year; in Chuuk, my wife was pregnant, near term. In my letter of intent for my application to UOG Marine Lab, in 1984, I had written that a master's degree was not imperative, but my first order of business was the learn the marine fauna (and flora, I think) of Micronesia; I was preparing to study traditional marine biological knowledge in the islands. First, as I had related to Professor Thomas Harding at the UCSB Anthropology Department, I would prepare a lexicon of marine life. I had completed over two years of classwork, and had garnered sufficient knowledge of the fauna that, once I had arrived back in Chuuk, in late 1986, I hit the ground running, and started collecting notes, mainly on the names of marine animals, but also on the lore and knowledge that was an inevitable part of the package. Hopefully, later, I would interview experts: fishermen, navigators... whomever; that is when the real work would begin. Ad notes piled up, it seemed to me that a PC would be the most efficient way to compile, sort, and analyze the burgeoning information. I had a working knowledge of computers, and had used some of the earliest PCs at the Marine Lab. I had an inkling of an idea for typing in the names and organizing it with other data. I tried a few things, even purchasing a copy of SNOBOL4, and learning another language (I don't remember which), for string manipulation. It occured that this would be a useful way to approach and massage the data. I made a little progress. A software package that was somewhat useful was Borland Paradox. It is hard to find any information anymore, in 2026, about this software; it was kind of a combination database and spreadsheet program, where the data could be displayed in different models. Progress was, again, minimal. In 1990 and 1991, my life went through a time of turmoil. I separated from my wife, and my son and I moved to Fono Island for a year or so, where electricity was absent. My Mother came to the rescue with a Toshiba laptop. After it arrived by mail, I realized it came with no software, not even a word processor. I made do with whatever I could cobble together. I started using 4Dos, something of a DOS clone, but free software, or shareware, even better than DOS. I don't remember what software I used. I do remember falling in love with that OS, because a file listing could include comments, in addition to the usual MSDOS short filenames, making it easier to organize files. In the Summer of 1991, I had remarried, moved to Tol Island, and had a new job at Faichuk Junior High School. At some point I had been kindly offered a large 12V truck battery by the US Airforce Civic Action Team, which had to update batteries every year; and someone, somehow, gave me a small, 10 Watt solar panel. So on Tol, where there was not electricity, I would be able to hook up to a laptop charger (automotive type), and I rewired a portable HP printer, to run directly off 12VDC by tapping into battery leads. I also did the same for my Zeiss microscope. I had to take the battery to town, by boat, every three weeks for charging; meanshile the solar panel kept my computer, printer, microscopes, and a light going. I now had a laptop, and I tried various editors to develop a simple database---a list of animal names with descriptive text. Word incorporates control codes into the text, making a mess of things. I needed a programmer's editor. A linguist from the University of Hawaii (UH), Robert Hsu, sent a demonstration copy of MultiEdit, which did some of what I wanted. But it did not enable me to type diacritical marks. Chuukese vowel variants are typed using the diacritic "'" are á, é, and ó. MultiEdit would be able to do this, but to learn how, I would need to purchase the manual for over 300.00. I had nowhere near enough money to purchase this. About that time, I had been receiving a subscription to Infoworld, a computer trade newspaper that is available by free subscription. One day, a short article was 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. 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. The unix tools like sort, ptx, grep, find, and others were helpful for my lexicon project. Demacs was a well-functioning port of Emacs to Windows. One of the first things I noticed about Demacs was the existence of a Tutorial, a genius introduction. Within minutes I was sufficiently able to navigate the interface and 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. I was working with textfiles, and since Emacs/Demacs is a programmer's editor, the files generated do not incorporate any formatting marks, which would interfere with manipulation of text, words, and characters. Shockingly, in this age of continual modernization, most of the tweaks I developed to my first.emacs file still function on today's Emacs 30+, in 2026. And, of course, since my project, and others, were generated in text files, for the most part, they are still readable today. This is 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 workalike operating systems, Linux and FreeBSD. Later on, on an extended medical visit to Guam, I was able, through generous assistance of the owners of Kuentos Communications, including Paul Carlson, I was able to download one of these and install it on my Toshiba Laptop. I randomly selected Linux, and I am certainly glad that I did. This was the Slackware distribution of Linux. This now meant I could install Emacs directly, and not a Windows port. The Unix text tools were available directly as well. The use of 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. Many scholars and programmers helped along the way. Among them was Professor Stampe of the UH Linguistics Department, who helped, over an extended period of time, to develop a sorting program in Emacs Lisp to 'alphabetize' my list, including diacritics, in a unique order, including features to make it easier for an english speaker to search the list. Early on, Professor Hsu, mentioned above, introduced me to his proprietary SNOBOL4 and SPITBOL text manipulation tools that were widely used in developing the PALI series of dictionaries of Micronesian Languages at UH. Among the innovations I encountered were the BAND format, a form of free form database for freely structured lexicographical data widely used by linguists for word lists. I was able to implement this format in later stages to compile the database that was pivotal in the final compilation to LaTeX, and ultimately PDF formats. I was able to use both built-in and custom emacs lisp functions to manipulate this data. Also useful were the I wrote emacs lisp functions to scan the lengthy band formatted file and output latex source.