In 1976, Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and BSD Unix hacker, needed a text editor that would work over a 300 baud modem connection. Emacs wouldn’t do. As Joy has said, “The people doing Emacs were sitting in labs at MIT with what were essentially fibre-channel links to the host, in contemporary terms.” So, he created vi, and thus began the longest tech flame war in history.