Message-ID: <bnews.cca.4253>
Newsgroups: net.emacs,net.usoft
Path: utzoo!decvax!cca!z
X-Path: utzoo!decvax!cca!z
From: cca!z
Date: Wed Jan 19 01:59:28 1983
Subject: Description of CCA EMACS
Posted: Sun Jan 16 19:02:50 1983
Received: Wed Jan 19 01:59:28 1983
Since I announced the availability of CCA EMACS last week, I have been
flooded with questions such as "What is CCA EMACS?", "What are its major
features?", etc. I am posting the following in the hope that it will
answer many of these questions. I will be happy to answer further
questions personally.
Steve Zimmerman
decvax!cca!z
CCA EMACS is a powerful screen editor closely based on the original
EMACS written at MIT. It currently runs on VAXes running Berkeley's
4.0BSD or 4.1BSD. Some of its major features are:
- An interactive spelling checker and corrector, which allows the user
to step through his text, pausing at each spelling error. The user
can either correct the error himself, or have EMACS suggest possible
correct spellings.
- Text filling, justifying, and centering commands, which can work on
lines, paragraphs, or arbitrary regions of text.
- A word abbreviation mode, which allows words, phrases, or arbitrary
regions to be abbreviated by a few characters. Abbreviations may be
saved for use in later editing sessions.
- A directory editor which allows viewing and deleting of files and
directories, as well as editing their protection fields.
- A crash recovery feature using keystroke files as protection against
machine crashes. An auto save mode is also available.
- A "Make" command for automatic compilation of programs, with an
interface which provides easy location of errors.
- The ability to run a shell and arbitrary subprocesses asynchronously
in a buffer. Up to five such shell buffers may be present and in
operation at any one time.
_ Virtually complete compatibility with ITS EMACS. All major features
of ITS EMACS (with the temporary exception of an extension language)
and most minor features are included in CCA EMACS.
- Multiple editing buffers (up to 200), which allow the user to easily
alternate editing between different files in the same session.
- Two window mode, which allows two different buffers (or two different
parts of the same buffer) to be displayed on the screen at once. The
user can adjust the size of each window.
- Keyboard macros, which allow a user to encode a frequently used series
of commands into a single command. A keyboard macro is defined by
executing the commands which are its definition, so there are no
special macro conventions to remember. Multiple keyboard macros may
be defined in a single editing session, and they may be saved in
libraries for later use.
- A "Tags" package, which allows EMACS to move directly to any C
function or variable in any file, without the user's having to know
what file the function or variable is in.
- Commands to pass regions of text through arbitrary Unix filters.
- A ring of sixteen marks, which allow a user to mark various places in
the buffer. These marks may be used as place holders, or they may be
used to delimit regions for other commands. Each buffer has its own
ring of marks.
- A kill ring of sixteen levels, which automatically retains text which
the user has deleted. Text can be later retrieved from any level of
the kill ring into the current buffer. The same kill ring is used
across all buffers, which makes it easy to transfer text from one
buffer to another.
- A set of 37 named registers (known as Q-registers) which are useful
for storing numbers, marks, or text.
- A full set of commands for manipulating rectangular regions. These
are useful for operations such as moving columns around in tables.
- An Auto Fill mode, which causes text to automatically be broken into
separate lines once it reaches a user settable right margin.
- An Undo facility, which allows the last change to the buffer to be
undone.
- Extensive online documentation, ranging from self-documenting commands
to an interactive tutorial to a full hierarchical online manual,
complete with its own specialized reading program.
- A full set of forward and backward movement, deletion, and
transposition commands for characters, words, sentences, paragraphs,
program expressions, and arbitrary regions.
- Powerful search and replace commands, which do case independent
matching at the user's option. There is also a Query Replace command,
which allows the user to decide at each occurrence of the specified
string whether that occurrence should be replaced or not. All search
and replace commands have variations which use Unix regular
expressions, and all may optionally traverse buffer boundaries.
- Optional numbering of the lines in the buffer by EMACS.
- More than 50 user settable variables, which allow each user to
customize EMACS in the way he or she prefers. The local variables
feature allows the same variable to have different settings for
different buffers.
- Dynamic key binding, which allows users to determine themselves which
commands they want to have bound to which keys.
- Init files, which allow variable setting and key binding to be
automatically done at the beginning of each editing session.
Message-ID: <bnews.cca.4599>
Newsgroups: net.emacs
Path: utzoo!decvax!cca!z
X-Path: utzoo!decvax!cca!z
From: cca!z
Date: Wed Apr 20 05:56:45 1983
Subject: CCA EMACS pricing
Posted: Sun Apr 17 10:14:20 1983
Received: Wed Apr 20 05:56:45 1983
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
Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!linus!genrad!decvax!cca!z
From: z...@cca.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.general,net.unix-wizards,net.emacs
Subject: Important notice for EMACS users
Message-ID: <4874@cca.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 13-Jun-83 16:51:48 EDT
Article-I.D.: cca.4874
Posted: Mon Jun 13 16:51:48 1983
Date-Received: Tue, 14-Jun-83 04:29:24 EDT
Lines: 48
This notice is directed to all users of CCA EMACS, version 162.35z or
earlier, and users of Montgomery's EMACS (BTL EMACS).
Versions of CCA EMACS up to and including version 162.35z had contained
some portions of Warren Montgomery's EMACS version 4.0, which was
developed by Mr. Montgomery at Bell Laboratories. Beginning with CCA
EMACS version 162.36z, CCA EMACS no longer contained any of the code
from Mr. Montgomery's EMACS, or any methods or concepts which would be
known only by programmers familiar with BTL EMACS of any version. CCA
has not shipped any versions of CCA EMACS earlier than version 162.36z
since January, 1983.
On May 19, 1983 CCA was informed that Bell Laboratories considers BTL's
EMACS version 4.0, developed by Mr. Montgomery, to be Bell Laboratories
proprietary information. They have asked us to notify those persons to
whom we may have distributed Mr. Montgomery's EMACS, or parts thereof,
that Bell Laboratories considers that software to be proprietary and
that its use must be discontinued and all copies in the possession of
these people must be destroyed immediately.
Although CCA no longer uses any of the code asserted by Bell
Laboratories to be proprietary information, we realize that these
assertions by Bell Laboratories may cause some inconvenience.
Therefore, we would like to make the following offer: If you are using
a version of CCA EMACS earlier than 162.36z, we will replace it with a
version of the current CCA EMACS which has been configured to have the
same capabilities as your present EMACS, but which contains none of Mr.
Montgomery's code. There will be no charge for this replacement. All
that we ask is that you sign the standard CCA EMACS license agreement
and send us a tape containing the version of CCA EMACS that you are now
using; we will return the tape with your replacement EMACS.
Although the replacement EMACSes we will be sending out will have
basically the same capabilities as the ones they are replacing, they
will actually be an improvement, since the new routines are superior to
the ones they replace. However, the replacement copies will not have
all the various features which have been added to CCA EMACS since the
originals were obtained. If users of these older versions would like to
take this opportunity to upgrade to the current version of CCA EMACS, we
will make this easier by making a one-time offer of $475 per CPU
license, in contrast to the normal $850 for the first CPU and $680 for
additional CPU's. There is no discount on the educational fee of $350
per CPU. Both the offer of a free replacement EMACS and the discount
price on the current EMACS are valid through August 15, 1983.
Steve Zimmerman
decvax!cca!z
{allegra,philabs}!linus!cca!z
Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!floyd!harpo!decvax!cca!z
From: z...@cca.UUCP (Steve Zimmerman)
Newsgroups: net.emacs
Subject: CCA EMACS hiring
Message-ID: <6857@cca.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 6-Mar-84 11:34:53 EST
Article-I.D.: cca.6857
Posted: Tue Mar 6 11:34:53 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 7-Mar-84 08:20:30 EST
Lines: 25
The CCA EMACS project is about to undergo a major expansion, and we are
looking for people to fill the following positions:
Programmer. This person will be responsible for adding a number of new
features to CCA EMACS. Features scheduled for addition in the near term
include a package for novice users, full word processing capabilities,
and the addition of an integrated electronic mail interface.
Programmer. This person will be responsible for porting CCA EMACS to
various Unix based machines on a continuing basis.
Programmer. This person will be responsible for porting CCA EMACS to
the IBM PC under PC-DOS. At the conclusion of this effort, this job
will involve adding further features to CCA EMACS.
All positions require a strong background in C programming. If you are
interested in any of these positions, please contact me directly, either
via electronic mail, U.S. mail, or by phone.
Steve Zimmerman
Computer Corporation of America
Four Cambridge Center
Cambridge, MA 02142
(617) 492-8860
decvax!cca!z
Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10 beta 3/9/83; site cca.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!akgua!mcnc!decvax!cca!z
From: z...@cca.UUCP (Steve Zimmerman)
Newsgroups: net.general
Subject: Announcing CCA Uniworks
Message-ID: <471@cca.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 10-May-84 13:41:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: cca.471
Posted: Thu May 10 13:41:09 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 13-May-84 07:08:06 EDT
Organization: Computer Corp America, Cambridge
Lines: 11
The EMACS group at CCA has been spun off to form its own company, known
as CCA Uniworks. The birth of CCA Uniworks was announced in a front
page article in this week's (May 7) Computerworld. A copy of the press
release that formally announced CCA Uniworks has been posted to the
newsgroup net.usoft. If you do not get this newsgroup and would like a
copy of this press release, I would be happy to send it to you via
electronic mail.
Steve Zimmerman
CCA Uniworks
{decvax,linus}!cca!z
Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10 beta 3/9/83; site cca.UUCP
Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!cca!z
From: z...@cca.UUCP (Steve Zimmerman)
Newsgroups: net.emacs
Subject: Departure
Message-ID: <133@cca.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 25-Aug-84 15:08:28 EDT
Article-I.D.: cca.133
Posted: Sat Aug 25 15:08:28 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 30-Aug-84 07:50:51 EDT
Organization: Computer Corp America, Cambridge
Lines: 8
For various reasons, the time has come for me to leave CCA Uniworks.
CCA Uniworks will continue to sell and support CCA EMACS. I will be
going to Masscomp, where I can be reached as decvax!masscomp!z. I will
not be working on CCA EMACS at Masscomp, so questions relating to CCA
EMACS should not be directed to me; instead, they should be sent to
decvax!cca!emacs-support, as mentioned in an earlier message.
Steve Zimmerman
|