found at:
http://www.sentex.net/~rboys/vince.html
The true story behind vi
by Robert Boys
This is the true story of the origin of the famous and versatile editor:
vi. It is NOT true that the creator of vi was on hallucinogenic drugs. The
fact is that the development of vi was a giant leap forward in the annals
of computer software. How vi got its name (vi) is not known and probably
never will be.
This program was written in the 1960s by a person called Vince Idiot. Vince
was born in 1944 in Syracuse, New York. Vince's mother started the Girl
Guides, held a Phd in Computer science from MIT, was a famous radio
evangelist and faith healer and coined the term "stupid is as stupid does".
His father never finished high school and was a self-taught man. He single
handedly invented the hydrogen bomb, colour television and rock'n'roll in
his basement workshop.
It is not true that vi is designed with one of the worst user-interfaces
ever. At the time Vince wrote vi, computers were programmed not with
keyboard input as today but with punched Hollerith cards; each with one
instruction or data word on it. These cards were stacked often many inches
thick and the data on them were fed in order into the computer by an
ingenious mechanism that read the holes in these cards.
Vince wrote the program optimized for these Hollerith cards. While vi
commands may seem incomprehensible to humans, it made perfect sense to the
cards and anyone who programmed computers in those days. The interface we
see today reflects this card-machine relationship.
Vince had intended to create a user interface after he had thoroughly
debugged vi. This is where Vince's career really took off. He had great
difficulty determining the last error in vi: the one that caused it to not
execute at all. He spent many agonizing month's searching for this error
and when he found it and vi suddenly started to work - he was so overjoyed
that he fell over backwards in his chair and struck the back of his head on
the card reader behind him. This blow to his head caused Vince to have no
recollection of his authorship of vi whatsoever. Vince never created that
badly needed human interface. Such is fate.
All was not lost however. Since he had forgotten about writing vi, he was
destined to miss the opportunity to learn from his mistakes and promptly
wrote the USENET newsreader program RN (read news). TRN, as installed on
the Tortoise computer at OISE and WLU, is RN with the now familiar and
helpful user interface that Vince did get around to writing.
Vince wrote other programs such as troff/nroff and participated in the
streamlining of the Internet Sendmail protocols but eventually tired of
this and helped develop the Intel 8080 microprocessor with its non-
orthogonal register set, dog's-breakfast instruction set and the twisted
system of multiplexed data
and address ports. Anybody programming an Intel processor in machine
language can clearly see Vince's contribution to the project. Of course,
the 8080 evolved into the popular Intel Pentium and 80x86 products of
today.
Vince also collaborated with Edwin Lingerie of Great Britain in the writing
of the MS-Dos editor edlin. (Edwin's great-grandfather designed a new line
of women's clothing in 1903). Once again, the origin of the acronym edlin
is lost forever. Some have suggested that since a lin is a precipice or
ravine (which is
where you will probably end up if you use edlin); lin forms edlin along
with ed (editor).
Vince has since left the computer discipline and it is reported that he is
now working for U.S. President Bill Clinton's public relations department.