Talk:Emack & Bolio's

Old posts
>> (although one of the more prevalent Hacker koans casts doubt on this)

No it doesn't.

Relationship to Emacs
Its true that the first version of EMACS was created the same year as Emack and Bolios started their first store. But the first store was NOT near MIT. It was in Coolidge Corner. I was both an early user of EMACs and my girlfriend at the time worked at Emack and Bolios around that time. (It was great Ice Cream and EMACS rules!) At the time, I thought it was cool that they had similar names, but there was no linkage from anything I can remember. Stallman was very much into creating names based on recursion and other techie ideas.

But that does not mean that the vibrant Boston/Cambridge/Somerville Ice Cream scene did not impact the tech world. The Lisp Machine Object Oriented framework Flavors and Mix-ins were directly inspired by ether Steve's Ice Cream in Somerville (the first to do "Mix-ins") Mixin or from my memory Toscanini's Ice Cream shop which was just down the road form the MIT AI Lab and had copied Steve's style of Ice Cream making and Mix-ins. I enjoyed hanging out at both and hacking on the LISP Machine at the Lab in the early 80's.

Robert J. Berger (talk) 19:19, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

EMACS was not named after Emack and Bolio's. However, BOLIO came later and the parallel name was hugely influential. Ice cream, like chinese food, was very popular with MIT students. 2603:8001:D300:A631:0:0:0:10D0 (talk) 07:57, 15 August 2022 (UTC)