Bill was probably referring to what RMS calls "Evil Software Hoarder Emacs" aka "UniPress Emacs", which was the commercially supported version of James Gosling's Unix Emacs (aka Gosling Emacs / Gosmacs / UniPress Emacs / Unimacs) sold by UniPress Software, and it actually cost a thousand or so for a source license (but I don't remember how much a binary license was). Sun had the source installed on their file servers while Gosling was working there, which was probably how Bill Joy had access to it, although it was likely just a free courtesy license, so Gosling didn't have to pay to license his own code back from UniPress to use at Sun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs

I worked at UniPress on the Emacs display driver for the NeWS window system (the PostScript based window system that James Gosling also wrote), with Mike "Emacs Hacker Boss" Gallaher, who was charge of Emacs development at UniPress. One day during the 80's Mike and I were wandering around an East coast science fiction convention, and ran into RMS, who's a regular fixture at such events.

Mike said: "Hello, Richard. I heard a rumor that your house burned down. That's terrible! Is it true?"

RMS replied right back: "Yes, it did. But where you work, you probably heard about it in advance."

Everybody laughed. It was a joke! Nobody's feelings were hurt. He's a funny guy, quick on his feet!

Here's an old photo of RMS (in the center) and Mike (on the right), with RMS holding a gerbil wrapped in duct tape, pondering about how to answer the question "Why do you wrap a gerbil in duct tape?" (You can google the answer... And it's only fake stuffed gerbil for cats.)

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/images/jsol-rms-gerbil-liz-m...

Here's mmccaff's story about working for UniPress, and my reply, explaining the "Evil Software Hoarder" expression, and linking to RMS's infamous natalism flame:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6646978

And a description of UniPress Emacs's vi emulation mode, which addressed the usage pattern of people who liked to quickly run vi to edit a file, then save and quit back into the shell, which you couldn't just emulate by firing up a new emacs every time, since emacs takes so much longer than vi to start up:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9398028

>DonHopkins on Apr 18, 2015 | on: Spacemacs – Emacs advanced kit focused on Evil

>UniPress "Evil Software Hoarder [TM]" Emacs had a vi emulation mode such that when you typed ":q", it flipped you over into an Emacs shell window with key bindings to behave just like you'd expect had you actually exited your text editor. Of course the shell mode was hacked so "vi foo.c" would flip you back into a vi-mode buffer on foo.c. Poor innocent vi users didn't even realize they hadn't left the editor! It was kind of like being in the Ematrix.

Here's some more stuff about the tabbed windows and pie menus I implemented for the NeWS display driver for UniPress Emacs (with some links to MockLisp and PostScript source code) -- at the time (around 1988), Gnu Emacs did not have multiple windows, pie menus, or tabbed windows (and still doesn't have pie menus or tabbed windows 33 years later, alas):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18837730

>That's how I implemented tabbed windows in 1988 for the NeWS window system and UniPress Emacs (aka Gosling Emacs aka Evil Software Hoarder Emacs), which supported multiple windows on NeWS and X11 long before Gnu Emacs did.

There's a screen snapshot of UniPress Emacs with tabbed windows and pie menus, running as the HyperTIES hypermedia authoring tool, on the wikipedia page about tabs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy...

More stuff about tabbed windows in Emacs, the HyperTIES hypermedia browser, the Emacs based HyperTIES authoring tool, and other NeWS implementations of tabbed window frames and window managers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18837730

Not only could UniPress Emacs support multiple frames, but it could also support multiple display drivers (like X11, NeWS, SunView, as well as text), and you could disconnect the display and Emacs would keep running, and then reconnect it to another display later, without losing all your work and context. So crashing your window server or disconnecting your modem didn't lose your emacs!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19743314

DonHopkins on Apr 24, 2019 | on: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (20...

Good point -- I haven't tried gnu emacs's X11 driver in ages, so I'll give it another try. Does gnu emacs's X11 display driver finally have a way to keep running after the X connection terminates, and reconnect to a new X server (or multiple X servers at once)?
Under screen, I keep long running emacs sessions with multiple shell buffers running for months and sometimes years, with all the files I'm working on opened up. Each shell buffer might be configured for some branch of some code, with an interactive python or whatever shell running the code connected to the database, with a bunch of useful commands and context in its history. It's a lot of work to recreate all that state.

(Digression: Bash has no way to save and merge and recreate and manage parallel history threads, does it? Or does the last shell that exits just stomp on the one history?).

Back in my Evil Software Hoarder days, I worked on the NeWS display driver for UniPress Emacs 2.20, and later on the NeWS display driver for gnu emacs. Here's a brochure from February 1988 about UniPress Emacs 2.20 and "SoftWire" (NeWS without graphics).

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/ties/scans/WhatIsEmacs.pdf

It supported multiple display drivers (text, X11, NeWS, SunView), as well as multiple window frames on each of those displays (which gnu emacs didn't support at the time), and you could disconnect and reconnect to a long running emacs later. In effect it was a "multi user emacs" since different users could type into multiple displays at the same time (although weird stuff could still happen since the classic Emacs interface wasn't designed for that).

Emacs 2.20 Demo (NeWS, multiple frames, tabbed windows, pie menus, hypermedia authoring):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU

Here are two different example of Emacs NeWS display drivers (one for UniPress Emacs 2.20, the other for Gnu Emacs 18) showing where the rubber hits the road in NeWS client/server programming of an emacs NeWS display driver.

They both download a PostScript file to NeWS that handles most of the user interface, window management, menus, input handling, font measurement, text drawing, etc, and they have a corresponding C driver on the emacs side.

There's also a "cps" file that defines the protocol (which is send in tokenized binary instead of plain text), and generates C headers and code stubs.

Together they implement an optimized, high level, application specific "emacs protocol" that the client and server use to communicate:

Emacs 2.20 NeWS display driver (supporting multiple tabbed windows and pie menus in the NeWS Lite Toolkit):

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs.ps.txt

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/TrmPS.c

Gnu Emacs 18 NeWS display driver (supporting a single tabbed windows and pie menus in The NeWS Toolkit 2.0):

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/src/tnt.ps

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/src/tnt.c

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/src/tnt_cps.cps

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/lisp/term/tnt-w...

TL;DR: Lots of gross hacky PostScript code and snarky comments, like throttling beeps to one per second and flashing random colors when it beeps faster, or preventing emacs from core dumping:

% Annoy the user
%
/^G { % - => -
currenttime NextBeepTime cmptimeval
1 eq { beep } {
gsave
self setcanvas
random 255 mul cvi setpixel
6 setrasteropcode
clippath gsave fill grestore
FlashTime sleep
fill
grestore
} ifelse
currenttime BeepTime NextBeepTime addtimeval pop
} def

% Return the minimum size to keep emacs from core dumping
%
/minsize { % - => w h
/?validate self send
CharWidth 10 mul Border dup add add
LineHeight 5 mul Border dup add add
% XXX: Any smaller and it core dumps!
} def