[MLUG] origins of vi

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

This is interesting (below).  So Joy wrote vi to work over 300 baud modem! 
I was wondering what it was designed in such an odd counterintuitive way. 
Now it makes more sense to me.  --Mike

The Slashdot entry:

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/06/0927209

Excerpt from article:

Linux Mag then asked: "So you didn't really write vi in one weekend like 
everybody says?"

No. It took a long time. It was really hard to do because 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. 1200 baud now is pretty slow.

9600 baud is faster than you can read. 1200 baud is way slower. So the 
editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it 
was painting slower than you could think. Now that computers are so much 
faster than you can think, nobody understands this anymore.

The people doing Emacs were sitting in labs at MIT with what were 
essentially fibre-channel links to the host, in contemporary terms. They 
were working on a PDP-10, which was a huge machine by comparison, with 
infinitely fast screens.

So they could have funny commands with the screen shimmering and all that, 
and meanwhile, I'm sitting at home in sort of World War II surplus housing 
at Berkeley with a modem and a terminal that can just barely get the 
cursor off the bottom line.

It was a world that is now extinct. People don't know that vi was written 
for a world that doesn't exist anymore - unless you decide to get a 
satellite phone and use it to connect to the Net at 2400 baud, in which 
case you'll realize that the Net is not usable at 2400 baud. It used to be 
perfectly usable at 1200 baud. But these days you can't use the Web at 
2400 baud because the ads are 24KB.

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