Re: [nmh-workers] Unnecessary dependency on vi???

[Bakul Shah]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2018 23:57:28 +0700 Robert Elz <address@hidden> wrote:
Robert Elz writes:
>     Date:        Tue, 20 Mar 2018 15:43:37 +0100
>     From:        Steffen Nurpmeso <address@hidden>
>     Message-ID:  <address@hidden>
> 
>   | BSD Mail had both of ~v and ~e from the very start.  I know of no
>   | known released file which acted otherwise.
> 
> Including in the first BSD distribution tape (1BSD) before vi existed (also 
> before csh existed, but that's unrelated...) ??

I looked at 1bsd and 2bsd distributions. I don't see Mail in
1bsd but it is included in 2bsd and uses VISUAL for ~v and
EDITOR for ~e.

There is an attempt to emulate getenv for v6 but it only
emulates HOME and SHELL, derived from getpw().  So on v6 only
the compiled in defaults for EDITOR and VISUAL would work.

2bsd READ_ME shows a date of Apr 19, 1979
1bsd READ_ME has no date but TAPE shows Jan 16, 1978

And yes, csh was also in 2bsd!

[All this is from the stuff archived @ TUHS. I didn't actually
use Unix until v7 and starting mid 1981. May be some folks
reading the TUHS list can provide more direct knowledge.]