That would answer "What is Emacs?", (although "for linux" far from says it all)
But the question was "What are emacs?", which sounds more like the question answered in http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/GNU-Emacs-FAQ/top.html
...skipping...
23: Where does the name "Emacs" come from?
Emacs originally was an acronym for Editor MACroS. RMS says he "picked
the name `Emacs' because `E' was not in use as an abbreviation on ITS at
the time.". The first Emacs was a set of macros written in 1976 at MIT by
RMS for the editor TECO (Text Editor and COrrector (originally Tape Editor
and COrrector)) under ITS on a PDP-10. RMS had already extended TECO with
a "real-time" full screen mode with active keys. Emacs was started by Guy
Steele <gls@think.com> as a project to unify the many divergent TECO
command sets and keybindings at MIT.
Many people have told me that TECO code looks a lot like line noise. See
alt.lang.teco if you are interested. I think someone has written a TECO
implementation in Emacs Lisp. It would be an interesting project to run
the original TECO Emacs inside of GNU Emacs.
But the question was "What are emacs?", which sounds more like the question answered in
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/GNU-Emacs-FAQ/top.html
...skipping...
23: Where does the name "Emacs" come from?
Emacs originally was an acronym for Editor MACroS. RMS says he "picked
the name `Emacs' because `E' was not in use as an abbreviation on ITS at
the time.". The first Emacs was a set of macros written in 1976 at MIT by
RMS for the editor TECO (Text Editor and COrrector (originally Tape Editor
and COrrector)) under ITS on a PDP-10. RMS had already extended TECO with
a "real-time" full screen mode with active keys. Emacs was started by Guy
Steele <gls@think.com> as a project to unify the many divergent TECO
command sets and keybindings at MIT.
Many people have told me that TECO code looks a lot like line noise. See
alt.lang.teco if you are interested. I think someone has written a TECO
implementation in Emacs Lisp. It would be an interesting project to run
the original TECO Emacs inside of GNU Emacs.