>>>>> Scott Chapman, on vi:
But it is ubiquitous, therefore I will use it and learn it. Sure emacss is
available to be installed on almost every platform too, but I think it's
much more likely that you will find vi(m) installed on any given machine
you may happen to touch. It wouldn't surprise me to find that vi(m) is
part of Mac OS X.
<<<<<
I date back to the bad old days when even "vi" wasn't assumed, when you got
used to "ed" because there was no guarantee of vi's presence.
Back in those days you _could_ be productive w/ vi over a 300bps modem-
though a VT-100 was a *bad* terminal for this. I kid thee not.
My oldest son (now 28) taught himself vi when he was 12; I once boasted
about this to a co-worker who commented that I should keep quiet about it
since it could qualify as "child abuse". Of course I top that now by
playing Firesign Theater albums to my 8 y/o daughter...
As for punch cards...
"Why, when I was your age, we didn't have none of these fancy graphics you
kids have these days; No, if WE wanted to see pretty pictures, we ran our
jobs to the card punch and held 'em up to the light!" (I almost killed
some mainframers when I first did this in front of them over 2 years ago
while they were trying out Linux on an s/390.)
When we moved to a new building we found four boxes of blank cards, all
different colors. They *are* a convenient size for a lot of tasks...
--------------------
John R. Campbell, Speaker to Machines (GNUrd) {813-356|697}-5322
Adsumo ergo raptus sum
IBM Certified: IBM AIX 4.3 System Administration, System Support
