Bill Joy's greatest gift to man - the vi editor
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Out of all of Bill Joy's contributions to technology, users appear most
fond of one of the simplest - the vi editor.

Joy leaves a lasting legacy of work both in the general technology
domain and at Sun Microsystems. The Sun co-founder announced this week
that he is leaving the company. Among Joy's list of achievements
are BSD Unix, NFS, UltraSPARC designs and some work on Java. But it's
vi, created in 1976, that really captured Reg readers' hearts.

"Bill's greatest gift to mankind was left off his list of achievements
(in your article)... the vi editor," writes reader Matthew Hawkins in
Australia. "I can live without NFS, Java and related technologies. I'm
not sure if I can live without vi."

Matthew is not alone in his feelings. Other readers called vi, "Joy's
lasting contribution to humanity" and agreed they could not have worked
without it.

To do vi justice, we turn to Linux Magazine, which has one of the best
accounts of how Joy came up with this little gem.

Back in 1999, the mag asked Joy what inspired him to write vi:

What happened is that Ken Thompson came to Berkeley and brought this
broken Pascal system, and we got this summer job to fix it. While we
were fixing it, we got frustrated with the editor we were using which
was named ed. ed is certainly frustrating.

We got this code from a guy named George Coulouris at University
College in London* called em - Editor for Mortals - since only
immortals could use ed to do anything. By the way, before that summer,
we could only type in uppercase. That summer we got lowercase ROMs for
our terminals. It was really exciting to finally use lowercase.

So we modified em and created en. I don't know if there was an eo or an
ep but finally there was ex. [laughter] I remember en but I don't know
how it got to ex. So I had a terminal at home and a 300 baud modem so
the cursor could move around and I just stayed up all night for a few
months and wrote vi.

Linux Mag then asked: "So you didn't really write vi in one weekend
like everybody says?"

No. It took a long time. It was really hard to do because you've got to
remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem.
That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just
barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely
fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade. 1200 baud now is pretty
slow.

9600 baud is faster than you can read. 1200 baud is way slower. So the
editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it
was painting slower than you could think. Now that computers are so
much faster than you can think, nobody understands this anymore.

The people doing Emacs were sitting in labs at MIT with what were
essentially fibre-channel links to the host, in contemporary terms.
They were working on a PDP-10, which was a huge machine by comparison,
with infinitely fast screens.

So they could have funny commands with the screen shimmering and all
that, and meanwhile, I'm sitting at home in sort of World War II
surplus housing at Berkeley with a modem and a terminal that can just
barely get the cursor off the bottom line.

It was a world that is now extinct. People don't know that vi was
written for a world that doesn't exist anymore - unless you decide to
get a satellite phone and use it to connect to the Net at 2400 baud, in
which case you'll realize that the Net is not usable at 2400 baud. It
used to be perfectly usable at 1200 baud. But these days you can't use
the Web at 2400 baud because the ads are 24KB.

That's just a bit of background on the creation of vi. 

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This is a copy from the information on
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/11/bill_joys_greatest_gift/