The Apollo has a bizarre operating system which does not permit Emacs to be dumped with preloaded pure Lisp code. Therefore, each time you start Emacs on this system, the standard Lisp code is loaded into it. Expect it to take a long time. You can prevent loading of the standard Lisp code by specifying the -nl switch. It must come at the beginning of the command line; only the -t and -batch switches may come before it. You must use m-apollo.h in the config.h file, together with s-bsd4.2.h. There is one remaining problem on the Apollo. You must replace the CPP line in src/Makefile with "CPP = /usr/lib/cpp". The C preprocessor lives there rather than in /lib/cpp because the Aegis OS uses the /lib directory as the repository for shared libraries. Here is a design for a method of dumping and reloading the relevant necessary impure areas of Emacs. On dumping, you need to dump only the array `pure' plus the locations that contain values of forwarded Lisp variables or that are protected for garbage collection. The former can be found by a garbage- collection-like technique, and the latter are in the staticprolist vector (see alloc.c for both things). Reloading would work in an Emacs that has just been started; except when a switch is specified to inhibit this, it would read the dump file and set all the appropriate locations. The data loaded must be relocated, but that's not hard. Those locations that are of type Lisp_Object can be found by a technique like garbage-collection, and those of them that point to storage can be relocated. The other data read from the file will not need to be relocated. The switch to inhibit loading the data base would be used when it is time to dump a new data base. This would take a few seconds, which is much faster than loading the Lisp code of Emacs from scratch. .