Most people have no idea why vi made sense way back when (and, in my opinion, does not today).
I used VT100 terminals for years on both mainframe and CP/M systems. Keyboards were not very standardized before then, the mouse did not exist and most text editors had to use all sorts of convoluted commands to allow you to do anything.
I ran the first version of AutoCAD back then on a CP/M system with 64K of RAM, an S-100 RAMDISK card, an 8087 math co-processor on yet another S-100 card, another card with a graphics co-processor and a 1K x 1K CRT-based analog display. This is the reason AutoCAD has the console. You would type the commands on your VT-100 terminal and the graphics would happen on the stand-alone display. You had to load and unload modules based on what you were doing in order to control memory consumption. AutoLISP, the version of LISP included with AutoCAD, was invaluable.
I used VT100 terminals for years on both mainframe and CP/M systems. Keyboards were not very standardized before then, the mouse did not exist and most text editors had to use all sorts of convoluted commands to allow you to do anything.
http://www.vintagecomputer.net/digital/VT100/DEC_VT100_SYSBO...
I ran the first version of AutoCAD back then on a CP/M system with 64K of RAM, an S-100 RAMDISK card, an 8087 math co-processor on yet another S-100 card, another card with a graphics co-processor and a 1K x 1K CRT-based analog display. This is the reason AutoCAD has the console. You would type the commands on your VT-100 terminal and the graphics would happen on the stand-alone display. You had to load and unload modules based on what you were doing in order to control memory consumption. AutoLISP, the version of LISP included with AutoCAD, was invaluable.
Oh, yeah, 8 inch floppies and no hard drives.
Everything worked.