[nixcraft]

In the old days, Unix rescue boot floppy disk to fix workstations or servers only included minimal text editors such as ed (i think vi was added later). So if you were a Unix admin or power user, you need to know ed to fix the dam system. The 'ed' text editor was available everywhere. These days rescue disks boot from USB or CD/DVD-ROM and may have a full desktops or operating systems running. A little bit of history, I guess. BTW, I prefer https://www.system-rescue.org/ these days to fix Linux bare metals.

[kjs3]

Perhaps more important, as a line editor, 'ed' would often work when your terminal was otherwise too borked up for vi or pico to work.

[anyfoo]

Though in most cases, you can just type “reset” to reset your terminal to a sane state. If the problem is not the terminal’s state, but how software is trying to talk to it, setting TERM=vt100 (with a “reset” for good measure afterwards) usually works for most if not all terminals nowadays.

[kjs3]

I used 'stty sane' or mucked with 'tset' directly. To many possibilities of 'reset' being aliased to something I might not want.

setting TERM=vt100 (with a “reset” for good measure afterwards) usually works for most if not all terminals nowadays

Kids these days and their 'everything is a vt100'. Perhaps true nowadays, but certainly not always (looks at his HP700/96).

[awesomegoat_com]

You just reminded me a slightly related strip: http://www.stripcreator.com/comics/elemental/605973

[vbezhenar]

Last time I checked, OpenBSD installer didn't have any editors but ed.

[cylinder714]

It comes with vi (nvi, maybe?) and mg, a small Emacs-like editor.

[anthk]

He means the ramdisk image, not the installed system, which obviously has ed, vi and mg. And xedit.