It is also because the code didn't include much error handling or documentation. Everybody can remember their first experience with the editor 'ed'. Nor did i

It is also because the code didn't include much error handling or documentation. Everybody can remember their first experience with the editor 'ed'. Nor did it handle complex things like non-English characters or smart terminals. The system was minimal in the extreme because the hardware they were working on was shockingly underpowered by today's standards. A full lab worth of users would be sharing 56kB of RAM on their PDP11. When your environment is that constrained you don't have the luxury of writing bloated code.