3 ms·

I don't remember that at all. Are you sure you're not thinking of emacs?

• brazzy 7y ago
  Nope, definitely vi. I have a vintage book about Unix written ca. 1980, and the author's concern was that "vi's code segment will fill up most of the main memory of a large PDP-11, leaving you little space for the text you're editing". They considered their university's heavily modified fork of ed (the standard text editor, remember?) to be a better choice.
  • mceachen 7y ago
    FWIW, by 1988 the shared servers on UC campuses were sufficiently provisioned to happily run vi, compiler toolchains, and MUDs for several hundred concurrent users.
• dspillett 7y ago
  There was a time when vi and some of its variants (for instance vim) were considered relatively heavy, at least on shared servers. I'm thinking back to my Uni days with two rooms full of vt100 clones all connected to one poor box and people telnet-ing in from other locations too (SSH was pretty much brand new at that point so wasn't available). Of course emacs was worse, but there were even leaner options than vi/vim/related too.