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The vi editor was developed at the University of California, Berkeley,
as part of Berkeley UNIX (BSD), and is included as a standard utility in
SVR4. Before vi was developed, the standard UNIX system editor was ed.
The ed editor was line-oriented, which made it difficult to see the
context of your editing. Then ex came along--ex was a superset of ed.
The most notable advantage that ex had over ed was a display editing
facility that allowed users to work with a full screen of text instead
of with only a line at a time. While you were using ex, you could use
the display editing facility by giving ex the command vi (for visual
mode). People used the display editing facility of ex so extensively
that the developers of ex made it possible to start the editor so that
you were using the display editing facility at once, without having to
start ex and give the vi command. Appropriately, they named the new
facility vi.
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