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(efaq)Origin of the term Emacs

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Where does the name "Emacs" come from?
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   Emacs originally was an acronym for Editor MACroS.  RMS says he
"picked the name Emacs because <E> was not in use as an abbreviation on
ITS at the time."  The first Emacs was a set of macros written in 1976
at MIT by RMS for the editor TECO (Text Editor and COrrector,
originally Tape Editor and COrrector) under ITS on a PDP-10.  RMS had
already extended TECO with a "real-time" full-screen mode with
reprogrammable keys.  Emacs was started by Guy Steele
<gls@east.sun.com> as a project to unify the many divergent TECO
command sets and key bindings at MIT, and completed by RMS.

   Many people have said that TECO code looks a lot like line noise; you
can read more at `news:alt.lang.teco'.  Someone has written a TECO
implementation in Emacs Lisp (to find it, see Note: Packages that do
not come with Emacs); it would be an interesting project to run the
original TECO Emacs inside of Emacs.

   For some not-so-serious alternative reasons for Emacs to have that
name, check out the file `etc/JOKES' (Note: File-name conventions).