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ggm
From a software archeological perspective, bash and tcsh and MIT X windows are the root agents which propagated the Emacs keybinding world wide. It's what x11 did, in x applications and subsequently in the first web browsers and by extension pretty much everything.
signa11
> bash and tcsh and MIT X windows are the root agents which propagated the Emacs keybinding world wide

i have always been under the impression that bash being a GNU project used readline for line-editing, from whence came emacs like bindings by default.

you can ofcourse change that f.e. in zsh with a

  'set -o vi'
and i am sure something similar would exist for bash as well.

since we are talking about 's/w archeology' :), vi is a posix standard, which is why it is universally available...

ggm
X11 existed before bash. well X, X10R4. which already had the MIT meme of emacs. Bash is around 1989. X is around 1982/3

readline came about 1989 to IIRC. erased ChangeLog without dates makes it hard.

don't get me started on gnu getopt() and the getopt() wars. Why did we --have to --go=to that..