The endless, tedious “Emacs versus vi” editor flame war—now going strong for four decades—actually traces its roots to slow 1970s printers at Bell Labs. Bill Joy developed vi largely because his ADM-3A terminal was painfully slow and lacked cursor keys, making Emacs-style line-by-line editing agonizingly frustrating. In contrast, Richard Stallman’s MIT crew enjoyed fancy terminals and smooth scrolling. The practical necessity of working around primitive tech thus inadvertently birthed Unix’s most bitter religious divide. Decades later, sysadmins continue zealously debating editors, unaware they’re perpetuating arguments sparked entirely by clunky hardware.
