Hallo Murray!

 ML>     Emacs existed long before Linux was ever dreamed of.  It is a
 ML> very-capable text editor for Unix, written by (IIRC) a student at MIT 
 ML> in the 1970's.

I don't know if he was a student at MIT in the 70's, but one of the initators
of Emacs (you never know for sure who is the main author in a GNU project) is
Richard Stallman.

 ML>     I believe (but am not sure) that there are emacs "ports" to OS/2.

Eberhard Matthes ported Emacs for OS/2 PM up to 19.33. Works very good (all
Unix features are there, plus some OS/2 PM gimmicks like dragging text into
the Emacs window opens the file there, etc.). There also is Emacs for XFree86, 
of couse, and an Emacs 20.x port by Holger Veit. I don't know for sure if the
20.x port is only for XFree86, or if it also has a PM version. I'm still at
19.33.

 ML> (There, I'm back on topic!)  However, any youngster who grew up on 
 ML> GUIs would probably find emacs hard to use.

Of course. But even yougsters are forced to learn Emacs sometimes, if they
work in Unix environments, and once you have learned it, it proves to be a
very powerful tool and you start using it on all platforms where you can get
it. That's another advantage on Emacs, you can get it on nearly every
computer.

Viele Gr��e,
Tobias

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