Image above NOT a title for Burrough’s 1912 story “A Princess of Mars” 1 This is an essay inspired by Greenberg’s 1996 “Mother of All Emacs papers"2. We learn in that paper that Emacs was born of a necessity for a text tool that had to solve several problems: Hardware (memory space) limitations Costly, lengthy compilation times for other programming languages Steep learning curve compared to arcane character-editing tools, which were painfully close to the assembler and showed it It succeeded in all of these, and after we look at how it succeeded we’ll be ready to think about its viability in an age where the problems have changed completely.