REVIEW: Real programmers use cat as their editor.
JOY: That's right! There you go! It is too much trouble to say ed, because cat's smaller and only needs two pages of memory - plus you're not likely to get swapped out. That's why ed didn't prompt, you know. The performance of the system was just horrible. It would swap things out randomly and do all sorts of things. In ed you might type "a", but have no idea how far behind the system was. And it didn't matter, and long as it didn't get more that a few hundred characters behind and start throwing lines away without telling you.
Typically it wasn't that bad. If it had been prompting, you would have hit carriage return and wait for the prompt, and it would have taken three seconds to comment. That's something we noticed when we put em up. We put in the prompt and suddenly realized it had to go through the operating system.
I think UNIX has lived with grace for years. We've had the grace of people not being able to tell when the system was doing a bad job of scheduling the CPU. Now we can't hide behind time-sharing.