On 05/02/20, Rob Pike wrote:
> Also a side note about vi: Plan 9 had another program with that name.
> http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/vi. The 'v' meant mips for obscure but
> consistent reasons. Yet another reason the command was pronounced V.I.
> regardless of its function.

Actually now i wonder, was there a system behind those characters?
These are all i could find (roughly in order of appearance):
2 68020
8 i386
v mips
k sparc
z hobbit
6 i960
x AT&T 3210
1 68000
9 AMD 29000
q ppc
7 alpha
5 ARM (7500)
6 amd64
9 ppc64
0 mips little endian

There's a '2' in '68020' and an '8' in '386' and maybe i can understand
'k' as sparK, but why is v mips or q powerpc?

aap