[medoc]

I used ed on video terminals connected to VME 68000 Unix V7 machines around 1986. For some reason, I don't remember using vi on them, and in any case, ed remained very useful when the terminal type was misconfigured or unknown to the system, which happened quite a lot (I guess that not everything emulated a VT100 at the time). We actually jumped directly from ed to some Emacs relative (Jove probably), which was the beginning of paradise, and then we received our Sun 3 and it was Emacs all the way to present :)

[cylinder714]

vi is painful over slow lines, maybe that was it? When I started at SCO in '86 my terminal connected at 9600 baud to a VME 68000 box named "scotty" running Xenix. (All our servers had names containing "sco". Over the years I think we had to settle for just having the letters somewhere in the name.) 9600 baud was luxury after university, where all our terminals connected at 2400 baud.