Interview with Bill Joy (1984) | Hacker News Reader

Interview with Bill Joy (1984)

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Thank you! I really enjoyed that.

Here is a 1999 interview with Bill Joy on the design of vi:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/11/bill_joys_greatest_g...

While we're at it, his AI warning from 2000: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html

In that article , George Coulouris cites a description of em linked to at the following page:

http://www.dcs.qmul.ac.uk/~george/history/index.html

Unfortunately, that page is 403 and archive.org never captured a working copy of it [1] -- in case anyone is in a position to address this.

I see one copy from 2010; however, it is simply the 403 message:

http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/...

http://web.archive.org/web/20100818011111/http://www.eecs.qm...

I've got the same material (and more) on my personal website at: http://www.coulouris.net/cs_history/em_story/ There's complete source code for 'em' there too.

George Coulouris

This is really insightful read.

> I think the wonderful thing about vi is that it has such a good market share because we gave it away. Everybody has it now. So it actually had a chance to become part of what is perceived as basic UNIX. EMACS is a nice editor too, but because it costs hundreds of dollars, there will always be people who won't buy it.

Its hard to imagine unix without vi; I didn't realise there was a time when it wasn't there.

ed is the standard editor.

Also hard to imagine paying $400 (source: http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html) for a text editor. Even if it's Emacs.

FWIW, 'EMACS' referenced here is not the 'GNU Emacs' which we are familiar with today - but from Gosling/Unipress.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3427495

It must have been one hell of a time during 60s/70s as a student at UC Berkeley's CS dept. You had opportunity to work with folks like Joy, Thompson etc. (who were also students) who became legends of the field by contributing things like UNIX, BSD, vi etc.

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