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Vim in '95 was a breath of fresh air: improved feature set over plain vi and still zippy.

There were a bunch of other vi alternatives back in that day. vim was just the one that wound up becoming the most popular.

nvi and vile were two names that spring to mind, but I know there were others.

Looks like vile itself started in 1992:

nvi came standard on FreeBSD at least through 5.x, iirc.