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Comment by FullyFunctional | Hacker News Reader

In 1989 when I was part-time IT staff at Århus University, CS. Dept. we had to turn down a professor who requested doing exactly this with his Sun workstation (it might have been possible, but we didn't have the resources to support it).

My only requirement for my first personal PC (T1800, 386/sx, 4 MiB, monochrome) was that it could run True Emacs (on Linux) - I could certainly have used this, but `exec emacs` achieves nearly the same.

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Fortunately I don't work at universities much any more, but I found IT to be even less accommodating than at a megacorps. My department luckily realised this early on and classed all computers as "experiment equipment" and had our own techs to any necessary admin.

We had to add emacs to /etc/shells because we had users who really did chsh to it.

Well, back in the day you could run Emacs and a Scheme interpreter (MIT Scheme) as a textinfo format under an i386 just fine. No X, of course.

I used to run Emacs on a 386SX, not with X, but with OS/2 Presentation Manager. Had 8MB of RAM, though.

DAIMI! Did you code in TRINE?

This is getting pretty off-topic, but for the record:

I think I was taught that 1st year, or perhaps the predecessor. It's was MIS' first year teaching. IIRC, Trine's array started at 1 and there was much debate over the merits of that vs. starting at zero like C but other than that it was a reasonable language for the time.

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