Editor History

Someone on the #openbsd IRC channel thought that vi and ex are the same thing, which is true now, but was not true in the past, as the vi part was only bolted on afterwards. A posting to usenet has a chart of this,

editors.txt

which shows that ex/vi is "version 3" of ex. And some other related docs:

joy.txt

20yearsbsd.txt

interview.txt

Most Roman writing was lost when papyrus decayed due to neglect rather than in any Alexandrian fires, though whether or how much of this computer stuff is preserved is still an open question. There is a lot of linkrot, but on the other hand archive.org exists, but on the other hand a round of global strife could easily cause lots of things not to be copied nor maintained, but on the other hand some folks have been working on long term archival formats, but on the other hand what good is that should the incompetent inherit the earth? Like, what happens when folks pass the bytes along, but do not understand them?

A different tangent is that "I like vi" is an emotive truth, which may have little to no bearing on actual truths, e.g. the sort of thing that can be verified in a lab, or perhaps statistical studies of who uses which editor. Emotive truths are more the realm for poetry than science.