Monday, October 14, 2013

Re: Where can I find the original source code for vi as developed by Bill Joy in 1976?

DwigtArmyOfChampions wrote:
> I want to see exactly what vi was like when Bill Joy invented it in 1976. I am a purist.
>

Oh, what to do on a holiday... research a silly question like this one.
Amazing what one finds with a little googling, and a quick trip to the
WikiPedia page on vi. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi)

One ends up finding out that the original vi (as written by Bil Joy) was
the visual mode of ex-1.1. ex-2.0 included vi as a hard link to ex that
invoked visual mode on startup. As WikiPedia puts it "Thus, vi is not
the evolution of ex, vi /is/ ex."

A little more research leads to the unix archive -
http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl (among other mirrors).

Plug ex-1.1 into the search box and you get, lo and behold, the source
tree for ex-1.1

Let us know if you manage to build it (1BSD/ex-1.1/makeex) - looks like
basic c code with not a lot of dependencies. Might even build on a
modern machine!

Cheers,

Miles Fidelman

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra

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