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Multics Emacs: the history, design, and implementation (1979)
Classic paper describing thie history and design of Multics Emacs.
Experienced and sophisticated users found Emacs to be eminently more usable than any of the previous forms of editing, and via the construction of more macros (for processing Lisp source programs, for example), could rapidly be extended to handle any task in the same manner. Creating function via the Emacs extension language and calling of external Multics routines begets utility without having to build an environment from ground up, and buys video management for free (by virtue of the automatic redisplay). Lee Parks, Charles Frankston, Carl Hoffman, Lindsey Spratt, Suzanne Krupp, Margaret Minsky, Gerry Sussman, and a large number of other people for all sorts of help, encouragement, and ideas along the way.
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