Vi Developed for Slow 300 baud Connections

Published at January 6, 2012 ·  1 min read

This is a lost post from my early blogs around 2012, rediscovered and posted here in mid-2020 Interesting discussion on Hacker News about an interview with Bill Joy, creator of Vi. Joy mentions that one of the most important use cases was that, in those days, everyone had only a 300 baud connection to the host. That meant the editor had to be efficient in screen repaints while interacting with commands from the user....