People waxing lyrical about using 'original vi', both nowadays in 2026 and back in 2006, haven't a clue what that is.
There's only one family of operating systems where 'vi' will actually run the original vi program by Joy, Horton, et al.:
#Illumos and its derivatives
#Tribblix,
#OmniOS, and
#SmartOS.
*Everyone else* uses one of the ground-up clones.
On
#FreeBSD,
#OpenBSD, and
#NetBSD, it's Bostic's early 1990s
#nvi, which was derived from Kirkendall's elvis, a clone written some time around 1990.
On Linux-based operating systems, vi either is Bostic nvi, or is one of the derivatives of STEVIE (the middle-1980s vi clone for the Atari ST that inspired Kirkendall to write elvis in the first place): Moolenaar's VIM or NeoVIM.
On none of those will you get original Joy+Horton vi in base, or indeed packaged/in ports.
Yes, Heirloom vi exists, which is Ritter's 2002 fork of 1985 Joy+Horton vi. But it's not even available in Arch Linux nowadays.
#vi #retrocomputing #ComputerHistory
