Hi guys, today I’m launching a new website that will bring you news, information, tutorials, and more from the Emacs world.
Deciding how to start a new website is always a pain so this time I’ll start by telling you who I am so you can learn a little about me and my love for Emacs.
I was born in Milan (Italy) in 1978, in a world where computers were not present in a typical household. Computers were heavy and expensive and were mainly used for specialized tasks like weather forecasting or in laboratories. However, the home-copmputer revolution had already begun and in a few years, many of us would have been owners of a real computer.
In my case, this happened in my childhood when my parents brought home a Commodore Vic-20. Despite the technical specs (the Vic-20 had 1MHz CPU and only 3583 bytes of usable memory) it was a love at first-sight.
Now you are probably wondering… what does this have to do with Emacs?
Well, in the old days, when you started a home computer like the Vic-20, you were greeted by a simple screen like this one:
**** CBM BASIC V2 ****
3583 BYTES FREE
READY.
█
Just a simple BASIC interpreter and a blinking cursor. Nothing else.
And there was no Internet or anything like that. To learn how to use a computer you had to consult books at the local library, share your experiences with other kids and go to a kiosk to buy monthly publications that listed several programs that you could copy by hand and try to execute despite the typos and the mistakes you inevitably make when copying hundreds of code line by hand (click here to have an example of what I am talking about).
Yes, this seems ridiculous in 2022, when you have real OS, modern programming languages, and tons of documentation, videos and tutorials that you can download from the Internet with a click, but all that effort with thousand of try-and-fail experiment and all the hours spent trying to figure out how that machine works were so educational for us. Every day we learned something new.
And Emacs reminds me of that experience, you are greeted by a scratch buffer and the old blinking cursor and all you have to do is communicate with your interpreter (this time an Elisp interpreter) and enjoy, knowing that at the end of the day you’ll have learned something new. That’s why I love it. And that’s why this website exists.
See you soon, Dave
P.S. By the way… if you want, you can still try the VIC 20 experience here ;)