And I trust Gumby's memory almost to a fault :-) I had already written a version of Emacs for the Apple ][ and Apple //e called Amacs in 1983 or so. I loved Emacs and Zmacs, and wanted to build software that had that clarity of architecture. So I knew I wanted readline to have as much of the feature set of a genuine editor as made sense.

I think Gumby was instrumental in talking to me about making a reasonable API for the completion part of readline. But I wrote a lot of code in the late 80s. And I wanted to use command line editing and completion in GDB, because we didn't have it. And I thought that was idiotic.