>>Hey, just had a passing thought of the VI on Unix, how I hated it's interface and how it was all that we were supposed to use and all the hair pulling editing it entailed :))
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>Ah yes, I remember using 'vi' back when I was at university. It was either that or 'ed'. Emacs came much later, but being the behemoth, loadtimes could be long enough to be irritating. Once you get the hang of the way vi operates, you can get in, navigate around and make your edits rather quickly. All this on a video terminal on a "high-speed" dialup connection at 1200bps -- certainly easier to deal with than 300bps hardcopy terminal...
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>Emacs could be programmed using LISP -- so you often found apps like: "fortune cookie", "Towers of Hanoi", "Zippy the Pinhead quotes", "Eliza", "command shell"
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>One of the coolest things I ever saw done with vi was the Turing Machine simulator macro set. All you needed to do load a specially-formatted text file that represented the "program" and "input", then you'd load the macro set and press "g" to start it. The macro set would actually edit the text file, updating the state of the Turing Machine and reading and writing to the I/O "tape". Even more amazing was that the macro set was ridiculously small (something like 1KB).

That is nice to know about vi. Yes I know of people who swore by it in those days but I sadly never got the hang of it, but then life changes for the better :)