George Coulouris collected these memories in an updated version of a page first published in September 1998 while he was at Queen Mary College, part of the University of London. The material includes his interview for Peter Salus's 1994 book A Quarter Century of UNIX.

At QMC, Coulouris developed em in autumn 1975 after the lab acquired VDU terminals. Experience with graphical displays, gained partly through William Newman, suggested that UNIX raw input could deliver immediate feedback during text editing. Em extended ed with character-level editing inside one line. Its name meant "editor for mortals".

Coulouris took the program to Berkeley during a visiting period in summer 1976. Bill Joy was working on a Pascal compiler there. He introduced Coulouris to the system support staff, who ran PDP11 machines with VDU terminals at 9600 baud. They initially considered raw mode too expensive because each keystroke could trigger a process swap. Joy and the staff kept the source, and Joy developed it into an early version of ex, which later led to vi.

UNIX had reached QMC in 1973. The lab had already built MIFS, a single-user interactive system for an Interdata computer, with William Newman and Mike Cole. MIFS drew loosely on TENEX and included a file system, systems language, compiler-compiler, line editor and debugger. After Newman visited Bell Labs, the team learned that UNIX offered similar facilities for multiple users on PDP11 systems.

QMC is described as the first UK UNIX site, with Heriot-Watt identified as the second in an early UKUUG newsletter. The hardware had Dectape and a 10 MB System Industries exchangeable drive. Mike Cole obtained UNIX V4 during 1973, wrote an SI disk driver at Berkeley, and built a kernel for QMC. In a later correction, he said that Berkeley supplied the software and documentation after the required AT&T permissions. Ken Thompson reviewed the code at Bell Labs, fixed bugs, and copied the system to seven or eight Dectapes. Cole carried the tapes to the UK in a PanAm bag.

Cole recalled presenting the system in Edinburgh and Cambridge in 1974, where researchers were wary of software without vendor support and commonly used RSX-11. He also questioned whether Kent or UCL might have been the second UK site. Jim Curry had earlier installed UNIX at IIASA in Austria, which Cole regarded as its first European deployment.

Em worked with control keys on ADM-3 and similar terminals. QMC modified ITT 3210 devices so their arrow keys sent editing commands, and Richard Bornat later used the approach in the modeless full-screen editor ded. Reprogrammed Hazeltine 1510 terminals added dedicated cursor and word-editing keys. Coulouris's original source and documentation remain available, and Pierre Gaston updated em for modern UNIX in June 2012 by adapting it to later C language, library and system-call conventions.