On Wed, 20 Jul 2022 18:43:05 +0100 Barry barry@barrys-emacs.org wrote:
At Berkeley university they liked emacs but on the VAX 11/780 only one user could be supported on BSD. The problem was found to be the I/O rate from single char input and echoing.
In response to the need to support 30 students on the VAX they needed to drop the I/O rate. This resulted in VI and matching kernel terminal ioctl changes to allow lines of text to be input as a single I/O. There is a usenix paper that describes this in detail that came out a long long time ago.
Now you have an army of graduates that know VI and use it at work. The rest is history…
But when I worked at DEC we used Goslings emacs on VMS and had enough hardware to support emacs. I still maintain it as Barry’s Emacs.
I first encountered UNIX after years of using VMS, IBM mainframes, and a plethora of personal computers. They ALL had editors better than vi. Who writes an editor where the arrow keys don’t work!
I use emacs -nw or mg when I need a terminal editor.
Jim