I had not realized that this was all they did.  I do remember the &quot;Garbage collecting&quot; messages from the older versions.<p>&quot;Like most Lisps, Emacs Lisp requires garbage collection. GNU Emacs has a simple mark-sweep collector. It has been speculated that the non-incremental nature of the Emacs collector, combined with the fact that, prior to version 19.31 (May 1996), it printed a message whenever it collected, gave garbage collection a bad name in programming circles.<p>Erik Naggum reported at the time:<p>I have run some tests at the U of Oslo with about 100 users who generally agreed that Emacs had become faster in the latest Emacs pretest. All I had done was to remove the “Garbage collecting” message which people perceive as slowing Emacs down and tell them that it had been sped up. It is, somehow, permissible for a program to take a lot of time doing any other task than administrative duties like garbage collection.&quot;