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vi history in BSD goes back to 1980

Sources are at http://svnweb.freebsd.org/csrg/usr.bin/ex/

A bit earlier — 1977 at least¹. I guess there was some (actual or alleged) descent from ed (the standard text editor) in the AT&T kerfuffle preventing it from being generally released under a BSD license.

Keith Bostic reimplemented it from scratch as nvi (new vi) for 4BSD.

Vim's code is not descended from either of those.

¹ http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=1BSD/ex-1.1/REA...

It’s pretty amazing to browse code repos that go back over 25 years. Does anyone know which version control system they (BSD) used back then? SCCS?

More likely a file server somewhere, email and patches.

After all Linux didn't use a SCM until quite late.

That's because Linus had the fairly unique position that CVS et al. are actually worse than not using a SCM at all.

The BSDs have been using CVS for a long time so it's plausible they used something like RCS or SCCS before CVS was available.

FreeBSD repo goes back to 1993: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=2

Yep, that repo was apparently converted from SCCS: http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/current/2012...

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