why would both of these editors be developed in such a way that they are downright inconvenient to use on the hardware on which they most frequently ran?
As other comments note, they were developed on earlier models or non-Dec terminals.
Also Emacs was not developed on Unix. The first Unix Emacs was created by James Gosling of Java fame.
Certainly not. The first emacs was created for the TECO editor on ITS by various people. It was further developed and maintained by RMS. Gosling's emacs came a few years later.
https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history has the details... there's some Gosling code (notably display.c with the skull-and-bones warning) in Emacs 13, but none that I can find in 15 and later.
Comments
As other comments note, they were developed on earlier models or non-Dec terminals.
Also Emacs was not developed on Unix. The first Unix Emacs was created by James Gosling of Java fame.
Certainly not. The first emacs was created for the TECO editor on ITS by various people. It was further developed and maintained by RMS. Gosling's emacs came a few years later.
Then there's this debacle I've never spent enough time getting to the bottom of... https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dhrcxw/james_g...
https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history has the details... there's some Gosling code (notably display.c with the skull-and-bones warning) in Emacs 13, but none that I can find in 15 and later.