Over at The New Stack [thenewstack.io] is a brief but entertaining history [thenewstack.io] of the editor vi [thomer.com] and Vim [vim.org].
“The editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think. Now that computers are so much faster than you can think, nobody understands this anymore,” Joy said. “It was a world that is now extinct. People don’t know that vi was written for a world that doesn’t exist anymore.”