On Thu, Nov 3, 2022 at 3:44 PM Diomidis Spinellis <dds@aueb.gr> wrote:

Was I misled?  Was there perhaps a hacked version of vi that worked in this way?

I think you may be mixing a few stories ... and features ...

v6 vs v7 PDP-11 vs Vax much less vi vs emacs. 

Some thoughts ...

1.) Emacs came from CMU and only a few years later after the Vax had was stable (post 4.1BSD)

2.) emacs was not so much prohibited as it was slow, it needed megabytes of memory -- that was limit.

3.) By the time emacs comes on the scene, workstations are showing up, so you did not have 20 students on a vax to UCB.

4.) Raw mode was a V6 feature for PDP-11, by the time of the Vax the TTY was using V7 using CBREAK (1/2 cooked) which still allows canonicalization

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