The vi editor was developed starting around 1976 by Bill Joy, who was then a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley. Joy later went on to help found Sun Microsystems and became its Chief Scientist.
[from ‘Visual Interface’] A screen editor crufted together by Bill Joy for an early BSD release. Became the de facto standard Unix editor and a nearly undisputed hacker favorite outside of MIT until the rise of EMACS after about 1984. Tends to frustrate new users no end, as it will neither take commands while expecting input text nor vice versa, and the default setup on older versions provides no indication of which mode the editor is in (years ago, a correspondent reported that he has often heard the editor's name pronounced /vi:l/; there is now a vi clone named vile). Nevertheless vi (and variants such as vim and elvis) is still widely used (about half the respondents in a 1991 Usenet poll preferred it), and even EMACS fans often resort to it as a mail editor and for small editing jobs (mainly because it starts up faster than the bulkier versions of EMACS). See holy wars.
Remember kids: VIM is not a vi.
Its bloated piece of shit for posers, and its in reality "nagware" (begging fir cash for some Christian mobks in Africa for fucking 20 years!)
Real VI is: nvi, bsdvi and Elvis
Proper vi is under 200kb instead of 40mb like current vim.
Emacs user… wow, didn’t know any of that. Was at UCB 80-84. Switched to Gosling’s emacs in 82ish, GNU in 83 while rms was visiting UCB. He shared Prof Fateman’s grad student office. Wild times.
The Joy of Unix
Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy charts where Linux and free software fit into his company's solar system.
by Eugene Eric Kim
https://web.archive.org/web/20000303115338/http://www.linux-...
https://www.linfo.org/vi/history.html
https://world.hey.com/dhh/wonderful-vi-a1d034d3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi_(text_editor)
https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/unix-review-in...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rByrD_R9Vuo
Early photos of Bill!
[from ‘Visual Interface’] A screen editor crufted together by Bill Joy for an early BSD release. Became the de facto standard Unix editor and a nearly undisputed hacker favorite outside of MIT until the rise of EMACS after about 1984. Tends to frustrate new users no end, as it will neither take commands while expecting input text nor vice versa, and the default setup on older versions provides no indication of which mode the editor is in (years ago, a correspondent reported that he has often heard the editor's name pronounced /vi:l/; there is now a vi clone named vile). Nevertheless vi (and variants such as vim and elvis) is still widely used (about half the respondents in a 1991 Usenet poll preferred it), and even EMACS fans often resort to it as a mail editor and for small editing jobs (mainly because it starts up faster than the bulkier versions of EMACS). See holy wars.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/V/vi.html
Real VI is: nvi, bsdvi and Elvis
Proper vi is under 200kb instead of 40mb like current vim.