The Internet & our hobby

[Dave Wade]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Diane
> Bruce
> Sent: 24 October 2015 00:01
> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
> <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> Subject: Re: The Internet & our hobby
> 
> On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 10:22:42PM +0000, ANDY HOLT wrote:
> > >>>>
> > Don't get me wrong... Emacs isn't a bad OS... Too bad there isn't a
> > decent text editor for it.
> >
> >
> > Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE smartphone <<<<
> >
> > Ah, but nowadays who cares about
> > "Eight Megabytes and Continual Swapping"
> > (well, the first part anyhow) when your phone has 16GB
> >
> 
My favourite comment on VI was one made by Eric Thomas on VMShare many years
ago...
.. it starts ...


Append on 08/26/92 at 11:03 by Eric Thomas <ERIC at SEARN.SUNET.SE>:

biff is what you use to tell unix whether you want to be told about new
incoming mail messages. The command is named after the dog of the person
who wrote it, which was unique in that it barked whenever the mailman put
something in the mailbox. vi stands for visual display editor, I
guess because it is unique in that it shows you the file visually, rather
than by morse code on the terminal bell. vi works this way: one page of
the file is displayed and the cursor is placed on the lower left corner.
You can conveniently move the cursor with the h, j, k and l keys, which
go respectively left, down, up and right....

You can read more here... 

http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare/browse?fn=TOOLKIT&ft=MEMO&args=biff#hit



> 
> I have fond memories of our Unix sys admin refusing to install a bloated
> editor.
> 
> vi on a PDP-11/45 (v7 Unix)
> 
> > Andy
> >
> 
> Diane
> --
> - db at FreeBSD.org db at db.net http://www.db.net/~db