nvi for serious hacking

[M. Warner Losh]

In message: <20051017003501.GB41769 at thought.org>
            Gary Kline <kline at tao.thought.org> writes:
: 	vi was the first screen/cursor-based editor in computer 
: 	history.

Are you sure about this?  I was using screen oriented editors over a
1200 baud dialup line in 1977 on a PDP-11 running RSTS/E on a Behive
BH-100.  Seems like one year from vi to being deployed at Berkeley to
a completely different video editor being deployed on a completely
different os in the schools that I used this in seems fast.  So I did
some digging.

vi started in about 1976[1] as a project that grew out of the
frustration taht a 200 line Pascal program was too big for the system
to handle.  These are based on recollections of Bill Joy in 1984.

It appears that starting in 1972 Carl Mikkelson added screen editing
features to TECO[2].  In 1974 Richard Stallman added macros to TECO.
I don't know if Carl's work was the first, but it pre-dates the vi
efforts.  Other editors may have influanced Carl.  Who knows.

Warner

[1] http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~kirkenda/joy84.html
[2] http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/EmacsHistory