On Sat, Oct 27, 2001 at 12:35:14PM -0500, Daniel Taylor wrote:
> On 27 Oct 2001, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
> 
> > Andrew Nemchenko <drew at usfamily.net> writes:
> >
> > > What is this bull? VI hands down
> >
> > vi wasn't too badly substandard an editor in the 70s.
> >
> <old guy rant>
> Ahem, vi was a darn good improvement over ed if you had the access
> to use it. The screen redraws were a bit much if you had 1200
> baud dialup, but it could be used quite nicely on a 9600 bd
> local terminal.  

You're mixing your time periods -- 1200 baud was pretty sexy for most
of the 70's.  I think 300 baud was the most likely.  Probably on a
Racal-Vadic modem with an acoustic coupler!

> Remember: in the 70's you would have been lucky to have a system
> to yourself, or even access to one running anything as easy to
> use as Unix. 

That's hardly true.  Unix was originally a hack on a pdp, but that's
not because DEC's commercial OS's were inadequate.  They were very
good, and as easy to use as any modern text based shell -- just too
expensive fore personal use.  

> If you were lucky enough to have a whole system
> to yourself it probably wasn't capable of running anything as
> sophisticated as vi. DOS was the Disk Operating System on an Apple
> II.

In '79 - only barely qualifies as the 70's.  Plenty of pdp-8 for
single user use could run emacs/vi/TECO, or some equivalent editor.

> The command line was a line number based BASIC interpreter or worse.
> 480x320 graphics was really good, and only used by scientists and
> gamers. The IBM PC with MSDOS wasn't due till 81.

You've forgotten entirely about Altair and all the CP/M systems out there.

> In the 70's Harddrives were spec'd out in small numbers of Megabytes,
> memory was allocated by the Kilobyte, and 9600 bd was fast.

Yes, but they weren't bloated -- one could implement an accounting
package for a mid-sized company in 8k of memory.  Really!

> A typical handheld today is about equivalent to a mid-80's desktop
> machine, or a mainframe system of the 70's.

Only in terms of processor power, not in usefulness.  It seems to me
that the relationship is something like

	P*B=1

where P is power, subject to increases following Moore's law, and B is
bloat, due to trying to add "idiot friendliness." ;)

> Having access to a full screen editor of _any_ sort was awesome.

agreed, but it's all a matter of context.  A line editor is pretty
cool when you're used to coding by hand then typing it onto punch
cards and debugging as a series of batch jobs.

Phil "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate" Mendelsohn ;)