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Discussion on: My Vim Story

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Eljay-Adobe

Bill Joy, the creator of vi, who used an ADM-3A terminal (which is why some of the keys are mapped the way they are, and the ADM-3A didn't have separate arrow keys, and placement of ESC and CTRL). His interviews where he is nostalgic about how vi came about, in a world with 300 baud modems (2400 baud if you're lucky!), super-slow bandwidth where every character is "expensive" to transmit, why vi has so many short single-character commands. And how with modern computers with enormous speed and incredible bandwidth make the raison d'être for vi to be obsolete.

Nevertheless, vi persisted. (And Vim too!)