Facts Every Teenager Should Know About Vi
Going through some of my college leftovers, I came across an essay from 1985 titled Facts Every Teenager Should Know About Vi by Doug Cooper. Just another example of the brilliant CS writing that came out of the 1980’s.
Back in the days of punched cards, there were no text editors, because punching a card was the computer equivalent of chiseling in stone. A card containing an error was thrown away because there was no way it could be fixed.
Hard teletypes, which printed on paper, brought computer editing into the cuneiform age. The paper output is simply a description of text stored in the computer’s memory. (In contrast, punched cards actually held the text of, say, a program, and needed to be read into the computer before each use.) Since a computer stores information in the form of magnetic or electronic impulses, it’s as easy to alter stored information as it is to magnetize, or change the magnetic polarity of, a ten-penny nail.
As far as I can tell, it’s a chapter from Teaching Introductory Programming with Oh Pascal!. Doug Cooper is now engaged in some fascinating work at the Center for Research in Computational Linguistics, Bangkok with the languages of southeast Asia.
