Re: launch a program in an arbitrary frame

[Hikaru Ichijyo]

Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

> FWIW, I used Emacs heavily back then, on Unix workstations, Lisp
> machines, and terminals (UNIX, VAX/VMS).  I never found it to be
> a memory hog or sluggish or bloated.  Clearly, Emacs was smaller
> back then too, but I've never noticed it being particularly slow.

Remember, there was a time it was considered impressive to PC users to
have memory measured in megabytes...any number of megabytes.  Even one
megabyte could be seen as a lot.

80's workstations would have several meg...but is that really a lot if
you're going to run a serious Emacs session with lots of buffers?  Keep
in mind, the whole point of Emacs is to keep it running and accumulate
as much of what you work with on disk as possible, in memory.  That
concept was a little ahead of its time, or at least, ahead of the
hardware that was running it.  Since it sounds like you were on UNIX
machines that early, you may also remember that when X came around, some
people considered that a luxury, since that took a lot of system memory
too, even on machines that had a framebuffer and were made for it.  A
lot of people just prefered to do without it.

Not only was Emacs considered a hog by some people at that time, but
later in the early 90's, some people even felt that way about the
then-new bash shell.  After all, it took about a meg of memory.  On some
of the early machines, that was a pretty big chunk of all the memory you
had, just for a shell.  Even Chet Ramey was a bit embarrassed about it,
though I doubt anyone really cares about how much memory we use per
invocation of bash now.

-- 
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from
oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent
that will reach to himself.
                                        --Thomas Paine