Who created vi and VIM, and what is their history?
Bill Joy wrote vi in 1976; Bram Moolenaar wrote Vim ("Vi IMproved") in 1991 as its modern successor.
That fifteen-year gap hides why vi feels so alien at first. Joy built it to be driven over a 300-baud terminal connection, where every keystroke was slow to transmit and many keyboards had no arrow keys at all. Making the letter keys move the cursor — instead of inserting text — let you edit with the fewest possible keypresses, never leaving the home row. That hardware constraint is the origin of vi's modal design, and Vim inherited it wholesale; it's why the muscle memory still pays off five decades later.
Bill Joy (vi - 1976)
- Co-founder of Sun Microsystems
- Developed the text editor vi
- Major contributor to BSD Unix
- Visionary for Open Source and network technologies
Bram Moolenaar (VIM - 1991)
- Main developer of Vim
- VIM = improvement of vi with many additional features
- Strong commitment to Free Software
- Made Vim one of the most popular text editors worldwide
Both significantly shaped the world of text processing and software development.
Go deeper:
Vim (text editor) — Wikipedia — Bram Moolenaar's development timeline from 1988 and the vi lineage.