Interview with Bill Joy (1984)

Article note: Huh. I knew about how much of vi was agglomerated via cross-pollination among academic UNIX folk, like almost everything in UNIX in the mid-to-late 70s, but didn't know how early they were looking at very-different editors (like Bravo) for inspiration, and how early they were aware that modality was a bad idea. Lot of _very_ forward-looking Also, looking from the present,"These editors tend to last too long - almost a decade for vi now. Ideas aren't advancing very quickly, are they?" in 1984 is absolutely hilarious, both for the obvious reasons about it still being around and everything in computing being stalled, and because of how much computing folk in that era under-estimated the value of consistency I'm one of the only editor-hoppers I know (right now mostly kate and micro), most people seem to learn one of the arcane ones and get stuck forever.