To: mitccc!AALevy%MIT-MULTICS.ARPA%mit-mc@cap
cc:  mitcc!info-vax%SRI-KL.ARPA%mit-mc@cap
Subject: editor/text formatter/printer for VAX/VMS
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Editor: 1. Gnu Emacs. RMS, who developed and maintained the orginal
Emacs for a number of years finally came out with an Emacs implemented
in the "C" language. It is the best engineered Emacs I've used, and in
some ways (such as ease of user extensibility) is even superior to the
Lispmachines Emacs editor ZMACS. Contact RMS@MIT-MC about availability under
VMS. The extension language of the editor is a real lisp, it has CONS
and a garbage collector.  2. Steve. This editor is a subsystem of the
MIT-Common-Lisp VAX-NIL.  Later versions have very good VMS terminal
handling, using the SYS$QIOW system call to read multiple characters
whenever possible. Extensive use of the native VMS instruction set
provided by NIL gives Steve an efficiency advantage over purely "C" based
editors. The start-up overhead of running a lisp-based editor like Steve
may be greater than that of a C-based editor, but the superior terminal
handling may allow it to win out over other editors in a CPU-bound
enviroment where there is sufficient physical memory to support
everybody. You never know until you try it, but for $100 for the
tape and 400 pages of documentation you cant go wrong.

Both these editors come with full sources and unrestricted full-source 
redistribution/pass-along capability. So you can be sure that all your
friends can use it.

Text Formatter: TEX. The one and only super-hairy macro assembler for
documents.  By all means get a macro package such as Botex (for manual
production) and/or LaTex on top of TeX for day-to-day usage. TeX also
comes with full sources and no debilitating restrictions.

Printer: With the street-availability of a bitmapped terminal finally
upon us, somebody is bound to come out with a DVITYPE program for the
MacIntosh, that allows TeX-formatted documents to be previewed in lower
resolution before going to hardcopy. A few people at MIT (and probably a few
other places) have been doing this for years, first with a previewer for
XGP documents and then with a PRESS-file preview program for the Dover.
Unfortunately for everybody the presence of these incompatible white
elephants, the PRESS-file based DOVER's at MIT, STANFORD, CMU ... has
had a kind of CHILLING EFFECT on these hotbeds of development,
preventing the generation of generally useful technology for everybody.
The Athena project, with its base in outmoded usage style of VAX and
IBM-PC's has had a similar CHILLING EFFECT on groups at MIT who would
want to work with more forward-looking, economical, and generally
available competing technologies.  I think it was a famous frenchman who
called this effect the "Tyranny of the Majority"

For laserprinter hardcopy I can mention from usage:
 * Talaris. I've used one of these at Boston University,
   they were running TeX, and had a maintenence contract
   on the device from Xerox.
 * Imagen. I first used one at Yale, and have 4 in use at Lisp Machine Inc.
   The notable thing about these devices is the operator-console,
   the TCP/IP ethernet interface, and the support code in "C" you get
   from Imagen.

These are just two of the many around, and is the area where you
would be spending real money for purchase and maintainence
(that is, if you dont blow all your money needlessly on the software).

-gjc