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September 12, 2003
Bill Joy Revisited
Just remember, you read it here first!
The Register is running a story today about Bill Joy's greatest contribution to computing: vi.
They include some more of the history and some links but they overlooked my story :-)
Anyway, if you a Unix geek or a Unix wanabe-geek, check the story and the links (and track down a copy of 'Life with Unix' for all the other inside stories - like biff, Heidi's dog).
As an aside, when I was working in the environment that is descibed in the story (using an acoustic coupler and a pay phone to dial up), there was a story that EMACS stood for Eight Megs And Constantly Shifting, which made sense when the average system had less than 1Mb of real memory (remember 640K is enough for anyone).
Later when people no longer understood the joke, I used to tell my students that EMACS stood for Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift which are the keys you have to simultaneously hold down to get out of the editor.
Posted by Ozguru at September 12, 2003 09:09 AM
