Hm.  I think that I may have picked up the (mis)understanding about vi's
origins from the Manx Aztec C manual (on the Amiga).  They had a ``z''
editor, which was a vi clone.  I seem to remember that they described the
colon-mode as a drop-through to the underlying line editor.  They eiter
said, or seemed (to me) to imply that z was an overlay on a line-editor.


For vi's terminal dependancies, try running window(1) and then ssh/telnet
to some machine.  See if vi still runs.  See if ex runs, even.  (ed will.)

This isn't so contrived, really.  When I was getting my system set up
initially, I put a low priority on X.  Function first, form second.  So I
actually used window a fair bit.  I recall being bit by programs such as
Pine and vi when trying to run them as I indicate above.


As for telling the new NetBSD admin to mount the necessary filesystems:
This works if the user knows what to do and how to do it, or has man-pages
available.  A new admin booted into single-user mode needs something else.

(Remember that being new to UNIX administration doesn't necessarily mean
new to computers, new to UNIX, unintelligent, or even new to
administrating other systems.  E.g., when I started using NetBSD, I knew a
bit about UNIX and I knew ed, but I knew nothing about administrating
UNIX.  I knew that I had booted into singleuser mode, and needed to edit
/etc/rc.conf.  Once I realized that I had ed available, I went from being
*very* frustrating to fixing the problem in short order.)


ed has its place.  And knowing how to use it is still worthwhile.


  ``I probably don't know what I'm talking about.'' --rauch@math.rice.edu