Unfortunately I am old enough to remember starting emacs remotely on a fellow student's computer so that he stopped working and went to the restaurant with us:

Unfortunately I am old enough to remember starting emacs remotely on a fellow student's computer so that he stopped working and went to the restaurant with us: starting emacs 'froze' the computer and made it unusable for a (small) duration.. So there's some truth behind the joke: vi started much faster. So I never learned emacs which I regret now because I feel that emacs is much better as a C++ IDE than vim.