On Sat, Oct 27, 2001 at 12:35:14PM -0500, Daniel Taylor wrote: > 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. You're mixing your time periods -- 1200 baud was pretty sexy for most of the 70's. I think 300 baud was the most likely. Probably on a Racal-Vadic modem with an acoustic coupler! > 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. That's hardly true. Unix was originally a hack on a pdp, but that's not because DEC's commercial OS's were inadequate. They were very good, and as easy to use as any modern text based shell -- just too expensive fore personal use. > 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. In '79 - only barely qualifies as the 70's. Plenty of pdp-8 for single user use could run emacs/vi/TECO, or some equivalent editor. > 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. You've forgotten entirely about Altair and all the CP/M systems out there. > 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. Yes, but they weren't bloated -- one could implement an accounting package for a mid-sized company in 8k of memory. Really! > A typical handheld today is about equivalent to a mid-80's desktop > machine, or a mainframe system of the 70's. Only in terms of processor power, not in usefulness. It seems to me that the relationship is something like P*B=1 where P is power, subject to increases following Moore's law, and B is bloat, due to trying to add "idiot friendliness." ;) > Having access to a full screen editor of _any_ sort was awesome. agreed, but it's all a matter of context. A line editor is pretty cool when you're used to coding by hand then typing it onto punch cards and debugging as a series of batch jobs. Phil "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate" Mendelsohn ;)