GNU Info

(mh-e)From Jim Larus

---

Next: From Stephen Gildea Prev: From Brian Reid Up: History

---

Enter node , (file) or (file)node

From Jim Larus
==============

   Brian Reid, while at CMU or shortly after going to Stanford wrote a
mail reading program called MHE for Gosling Emacs.  It had much the same
structure as mh-e (i.e., invoked MH programs), though it was simpler and
the commands were slightly different.  Unfortunately, I no longer have a
copy so the differences are lost in the mists of time.

   In '82-83, I was working at BBN and wrote a lot of mlisp code in
Gosling Emacs to make it look more like Tennex Emacs.  One of the
packages that I picked up and improved was Reid's mail system.  In '83,
I went back to Berkeley.  About that time, Stallman's first version of
GNU Emacs came out and people started to move to it from Gosling Emacs
(as I recall, the transition took a year or two).  I decided to port
Reid's MHE and used the mlisp to Emacs Lisp translator that came with
GNU Emacs.  It did a lousy job and the resulting code didn't work, so I
bit the bullet and rewrote the code by hand (it was a lot smaller and
simpler then, so it took only a day or two).

   Soon after that, mh-e became part of the standard Emacs distribution
and suggestions kept dribbling in for improvements.  mh-e soon reached
sufficient functionality to keep me happy, but I kept on improving it
because I was a graduate student with plenty of time on my hands and it
was more fun than my dissertation.  In retrospect, the one thing that I
regret is not writing any documentation, which seriously limited the use
and appeal of the package.

   In '89, I came to Wisconsin as a professor and decided not to work on
mh-e.  It was stable, except for minor bugs, and had enough
functionality, so I let it be for a few years.  Stephen Gildea of BBN
began to pester me about the bugs, but I ignored them.  In 1990, he went
off to the X Consortium, said good bye, and said that he would now be
using `xmh'.  A few months later, he came back and said that he
couldn't stand `xmh' and could I put a few more bug fixes into mh-e.
At that point, I had no interest in fixing mh-e, so I gave the
responsibility of maintenance to him and he has done a fine job since
then.

   Jim Larus, June 1994