Woher kommt der vi?

vi steht für ``visual editor''.

Die ursprüngliche Version wurde 1976 von Bill Joy entwickelt als bildschirmorientierte Alternative zum zeilenorientierten Editor ed. Aus einem Interview des Linux-Magazins:
``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.
So we modified em and created en. I don't know if there was an eo or an ep but finally there was ex. 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.''
http://www.linux-mag.com/1999-11/joy_04.html