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.
1.) Emacs came from CMU and only a few years later after the Vax had was stable (post 4.1BSD)
There were a diversity of emacs clones for unix as well...
2.) emacs was not so much prohibited as it was slow, it needed megabytes of memory -- that was limit.
The VAX 11/750 with 1MB we had at nmt ran emacs, but not gnu emacs. It was something special off the internet that was less featureful so took less memory. We had to have it since EMACS was popular on the DECsystem 20s we had.. The Vax could handle 15 students on each of the 15 terminals connected to it plus 5 or so coming in via telnet doing emacs compilein 100-500 line CS programs without being too insanely bogged down... < 10 and you didn't notice.
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.
Emacs of different flavors predated workstations by a few years though. GNU Emacs 18 dates to when VAXstations, Suns and others were shipping on volume.
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
All the oddball quirks in tty behavior can be dated to the early 80s to optimize somebody's use case...
Warner
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