In an enlightening article about the origin of the venerable vi text editor, Bill Joy reminds us that its quirks and qualities are all about the computing reality back in the 1970s: “you’ve got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That’s also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade.”
Woo! A (more than) seven-year-old interview largely quoting remarks made thirteen years ago!
“OS,” sure. “News,” not so much.
Edited 2012-01-09 17:15 UTC
WAAAAAAAH!
WAAAAAAAH!
WAAAAAAAH!
Since I hadn’t read this article, and I have never even been to the Reg’s front page, I would never have read this. But, it got posted here. Today. So I read it.
I’ve got nothing to complain about.
Good for you: I’m glad you got something out of it. Still, if you were really interested in Bill Joy or the history of vi, you could have found this via $SEARCH_ENGINE
Most people, though, expect a site with “news” in the name to have news.
I’m sorry for distracting you from all of the more up-to-date and timely Bill Joy/vi news.
Nobody really uses his implementation anymore, BSD’s tend to ship with nvi and GNU-land likes ln vim emacs.
True, but wouldn’t you say that decisions that he made to make vi perform adequately over a 300 baud modem still flavor the modern implementations of vi today?
I use his implementation. (I really do).
This story has recently had a revival on a number of news sites, not least Hacker News.
If you have a problem with old stories getting bumped, then perhaps you should take it up with the rest of the internet.
In general, I do not like old re-posted news. I had not seen this article though and did enjoy reading it along with my Chinese food.
I would have to say TCP/IP is more important but I have not used NFS or Java a all this week. I used ‘vi’ (well vim) twice this morning.
EDIT: I realize that Bill Joy did not invent TCP/IP. He is credited with writing the BSD implementation though and this code may have worked it’s way into Windows.
Edited 2012-01-09 22:38 UTC
Ah, vi. Hard to learn, but good to know. Even today, vi exists on most systems. Only some of the embedded stuff (mobile phones) has exchanged it for nano or some other newfangled stuff.
Edited 2012-01-09 23:04 UTC
A hard Editor is good to find. (Banana jokes deferred.)
vim forever
…I remember when I got a 9600 baud modem and thought “this is the life!”
Didn’t use vi tho’… VMS had edlin…