A bit earlier — 1977 at least¹. I guess there was some (actual or alleged) descent from ed (the standard text editor) in the AT&T kerfuffle preventing it from b

A bit earlier — 1977 at least¹. I guess there was some (actual or alleged) descent from ed (the standard text editor) in the AT&T kerfuffle preventing it from being generally released under a BSD license. Keith Bostic reimplemented it from scratch as nvi (new vi) for 4BSD. Vim's code is not descended from either of those. ¹ http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=1BSD/ex-1.1/READ_ME http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=1BSD/ex-1.1/REA...