I was working at MWC when Aaron was born. I think I met Aaron once when he was two or three, just briefly. I knew him from stories told by others, and eventually by following his writings.
MWC was quite an interesting company in its own right.
I have fond memories of the compiler. I bought it when my roommate got an Atari ST in college. Very well documented and I learned a lot from the C source of emacs that came bundled with it. I wish I had that source to browse again today.
It was a very good example of dogfooding--the document reflected what the guys working on the compiler and toolchain would want from such a compiler.
I believe the emacs that you are talking about is MicroEmacs, written by Dave Conroy while working at MWC. The source has since been made available generally, and the editor is the one that Linus uses. Daniel Lawrence later took over the distribution and here is one location: http://www.aquest.com/emacs.htm
I used it for quite a while, but then fell into Emacs and didn't look back.
Oh--I did get it to run on my HP200lx and used it there for a while.
