Rich Teer <rich.teer@rite-group.com> writes:
>On Sun, 9 Mar 2008, Greg Andrews wrote:
>
>> IIRC, Sun's vi, like /bin/sh, traces its ancestry back to the version
>> provided in AT&T's SRV4 Unix almost 20 years ago (1989). Since the
>> SVR4 blend of BSD and System V Unixes was a joint project by AT&T and
>> Sun (and others), the Solaris vi might even go all the way back to the
>> original version created at Berkeley in the late 70s.
>
>Given that vi's original author, Bill Joy, was one of Sun's founders, I
>suspect the latter is very probably the case. ;-)
>

True, though I found an August 1984 magazine interview where he said
at that point he'd been away from vi development for 4 or 5 years.
Also, I remember that in SunOS 4.1.3 vi was one of the very few apps
that used the SysV terminfo system rather than termcap. Made adding
new terminal types a PITA.

So he might have had less influence on the version of vi in Solaris
than his stature as a company founder would imply. It's hard to tell.

-Greg
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