On 27 Oct 2001, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:

> Andrew Nemchenko <drew at usfamily.net> writes:
>
> > What is this bull? VI hands down
>
> vi wasn't too badly substandard an editor in the 70s.
>
<old guy rant>
Ahem, vi was a darn good improvement over ed if you had the access
to use it. The screen redraws were a bit much if you had 1200
baud dialup, but it could be used quite nicely on a 9600 bd
local terminal.  Mind you, emacs wouldn't have been any worse,
if it was available on the systems I was using, or if they had
had the memory to support multiple users running emacs.

Remember: in the 70's you would have been lucky to have a system
to yourself, or even access to one running anything as easy to
use as Unix. If you were lucky enough to have a whole system
to yourself it probably wasn't capable of running anything as
sophisticated as vi. DOS was the Disk Operating System on an Apple II.
The command line was a line number based BASIC interpreter or worse.
480x320 graphics was really good, and only used by scientists and
gamers. The IBM PC with MSDOS wasn't due till 81.

In the 70's Harddrives were spec'd out in small numbers of Megabytes,
memory was allocated by the Kilobyte, and 9600 bd was fast.

A typical handheld today is about equivalent to a mid-80's desktop
machine, or a mainframe system of the 70's.

Having access to a full screen editor of _any_ sort was awesome.

</old guy rant>

vi: it's everywhere you have to be.

-- 
Daniel Taylor