In the 90s part of Germany's air traffic control software ran on Emacs
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2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
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HN comment orderFound it! Amazon also used to run on Emacs. > Mailman was the Customer Service customer-email processing application for ... four, five years? A long time, anyway. It was written in Emacs. Everyone loved it. > People still love it. To this very day, I still have to listen to long stories from our non-technical folks about how much they miss Mailman. I See more here : https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel#TOC-...
ATC is much more impressive than my little story of Emacs in unexpected places... My research group needed to very rapidly make an interactive piece, for a looming big open house event for sponsors and VIPs. For Reasons, we had trouble getting computers, but there were some ancient ones that didn't run much of anything. I'd been programming in Java heavily before this, but the solution to the immediate emergency of deadline plus resource constraints was... Emacs. Emacs would run…
(2021) Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26202517
Two closely related threads actually: [1] r/emacs - Do you use Emacs Lisp as a general purpose programming language? - https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/lly7po/do_you_use_em... [2] r/lisp - Is it worth learning Common Lisp for writing tools and solving practical problems if I already know Emacs Lisp - https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/lm03xe/is_it_worth_le... The first link has a mind-boggling story about air traffic control software running on Emacs.
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 529
- Total comments
- 161
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-02-20 | In the 90s part of Germany's air traffic control software ran on EmacsFirst breakout · Best thread | omaranto | 241 | 80 |
| 2021-02-23 | At one point, all of Germany's air traffic control message routing was in Emacs | ColinWright | 3 | 2 |
| 2021-02-23 | Emacs Lisp as a general purpose programming language? German air-traffic control | rbanffy | 8 | 0 |
| 2022-08-16 | Do you use Emacs Lisp as a general purpose programming language? | ctrlmeta | 5 | 2 |
| 2022-11-08 | In the 1990s a piece of Germany’s air traffic control software ran on Emacs | NotYourLawyer | 211 | 73 |
| 2025-08-18 | All ATC message routing in Germany was done through Emacs (2021) | xrayarx | 5 | 0 |
| 2026-03-09 | In the '90s Germany's air traffic control ran on EmacsLatest 20+ point return | clyfe | 56 | 4 |