[Sussex] modem connection

Geoff Teale tealeg at member.fsf.org
Wed Oct 29 19:50:11 UTC 2003


> If vi was good enough for Kernigan and Ritchie is good enough for me. 
> It's what yer s'posed to use.

Tut, tut, tut.  I believe the program you mean is in fact ed.

Here beginneth the history lesson:

vi was written by Bill Joy at the University of California Berkeley in
the late 1970's and only really became publicly available as part of the
Berkeley System Distribution (circa 1982) and certainly was _not_ used
at AT&T at the time that either UNIX or C was created.  

See this interview with Bill Joy for details on the creation of vi:
http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~kirkenda/joy84.html

GNU/Emacs on the other hand traces it's routes back to the TECO editor
used at MIT's AI labs in the mid 1970's. It can justly claim to be the
the piece of software for which the GPL was originally authored and as
such is the foundation stone on which the free and open source software
movement was built.

On then subject of memory and disk space required for emacs (a common
complaint of vi fans) well, unless you are running on a 386 or a
pizza-box sparc then I doubt either of these things will ever be a
problem for you.

-- 
Geoff Teale <tealeg at member.fsf.org>
Free Software Foundation





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