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"In the late 1990's, interest began to coalesce around Linux, the first really open Unix system released under the free software GNU license, and which might finally unify the Unix family after three decades of development."

I wonder if they ever imagined the editor wars and distro wars of today.

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Vi vs Emacs vs XEmacs was already a thing back then.

I like to tell how Emacs standing for "eight megabyte and constantly swapping" was a joke about Emacs requiring a lot of memory, as 8mb of RAM was considered a lot (i.e. the joke wasn't even claiming that Emacs took 8mb in memory, but that the entire system had a generous 8mb of RAM).

People had been arguing about editors for roughly two decades at that point; the 1980s had already seen the archiver wars (ZIP versus ARC versus ARJ versus LHA versus ZOO versus ...); and the early 1990s had already seen DOS+Windows 95 versus OS/2.

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