Bill Joy: Creator of the vi editor

I am a big fan of Bill Joy, creator of the vi editor and co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Like many, I seriously don't know what I'd do without it. Even though it was created in 1976, working with vi just feels so natural.

The vi editor is not the only contribution of Bill Joy. He's also the man behind UltraSPARC, BSD Unix, NFS and more.

While googling around today, I came to the following articles about Bill Joy.

From an interview given by Joy to Linux Mag. in 1999 (courtesy The Register):

What happened is that Ken Thompson came to Berkeley and brought this broken Pascal system, and we got this summer job to fix it. While we were fixing it, we got frustrated with the editor we were using which was named ed. ed is certainly frustrating.

We got this code from a guy named George Coulouris at University College in London* called em - Editor for Mortals - since only immortals could use ed to do anything. By the way, before that summer, we could only type in uppercase. That summer we got lowercase ROMs for our terminals. It was really exciting to finally use lowercase.

So we modified em and created en. I don't know if there was an eo or an ep but finally there was ex. [laughter] I remember en but I don't know how it got to ex. So I had a terminal at home and a 300 baud modem so the cursor could move around and I just stayed up all night for a few months and wrote vi.