I received an email from on the vim_announce mailng list that Bram Moolenaar, VIM creator, died August 3 2023. RIP Bram and condolences to his family and friends.
I have that spiral-bound GNU Emacs Manual (with the yellow cover), and it was a revelation also! I was working at a startup back in the early 1990s for a year or so when the lead developers there decided to ditch vi for Emacs. We then spent a month or so learning it and then I spent the remainder of my time there (2-3 years) using it for C programming but also News, mail and even basic shell stuff. I'm back to vi now (via Vim) and have been sucked into "modern tools" like Eclipse and Visual Studio Code, but some Emacs still exists in my muscle memory.
I just regained my access to matrix.sdf.org after contacting membership, but when I logged into the server I didn't see any of the rooms listed on SDF's page. I've sent another message to membership asking about room access, and will report back here
