This repo has the source as seen at DEC, who AIUI licensed it from Gosling
From the readme:
This is retrieved from reid.org/~brian/misc/gosling-emacs-1999.tar at larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history which is untarred and imported here. I wanted to archive here simply because it is the first big chunk of C code I read and I learned a lot from reading the code in the early 1980s. By then James Gosling had sold rights to Unipress and the company I worked for used to have source code license. We studied it extensively and made our own version of the editor at the time.
James Gosling’s emacs was there to be useful to Unix users before GNU emacs was available on Unix machines. GNU didn’t exist back then.
From display.c the famous skull and crossbones - connoting dangerously clever code, rather than copyright violation:
/* Ultra-hot screen management package
James Gosling, January 1980 */
/* Copyright (c) 1981,1980 James Gosling */
The following is apparently the start of the original README
=========
This is Gosling Emacs, version 84S, locally modified at decwrl.
THE OFFICIAL SOURCES FOR EMACS ARE KEPT ON acetes:/usr/src/local/emacs under RCS control. If you modify the sources on acetes, you are are NOT done until
you update mopar, generate a new version of emacs and test it on a Titan!
The Makefile for the Titan version is kept on circe. See below.
...
Found in this reddit conversation, where you can also read a bit about the backstory, the controversy, and Stallman’s telling of his side.
Two comments in particular:
It’s not famous for being bad and it’s not the first emacs to use a lisp like extension language. It’s the first emacs to be written in C and run on unix.
and
It’s famous for being so bad at lisp that it made RMS create GNU Emacs as a separate project; it’s also famous for being created by the creator of the Java programming language.
Whether these two facts are related is left as an exercise to the reader.
See also
A conversation with James Gosling