Re: Source and compiling instructions for old version of Emacs (< 19.x)

On 2009-07-31 22:18 +0200, Earl Kent wrote:

> I'm working on some research projects on the history of text editor
> technologies and more generally the early days of the free software
> movement.  As part of that research I would like to compile, on a
> contemporary Linux distribution, runnable, early versions of the code,
> say circa `88.  I've looked all over the Internet the only early
> version of emacs I can find is of 18.59, which is already 1992.
>
> Does anyone know of earlier versions and have
> instructions/scripts/patches for compiling it for Linux?  (Even early
> versions of 19.x took a lot of hacking for me to get up and running
> and I still can't 18.59 to run without seg-fault on startup.)

The Gentoo project still supports Emacs 18.59, it seems:
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/lisp/emacs/emacs.xml.

Two older versions, 16.56 and 18.41, are available at
http://matt.lee.name/gnu/MIT/gnu/.  Getting these to build will be a
formidable task, I suspect.

Sven