I've been using Emacs since 1979. I still don't know vi, and have no desire to learn (I can putter around in it, but it's . . . irritating). For short editing tasks on systems that don't have Emacs (or a sane clone of it) installed, I'll use ed before I'll use vi.
Back in the day, it's amazing how much code one could write in these relatively primitive line-oriented editors (ed on Unix systems, editors like SOS and EDT on DEC operating systems, and so on).
You can comfortably read and comprehend the Unix v6 kernel source code in a day or two. The printed form of Lyons Notes is about half a centimeter thick, maybe 150 pages.
Machines were smaller then, too. 64K of code on a PDP-11, small ROMs (hundreds of KB) for the larger embedded systems.
My belabored point: Systems were smaller. There was a lot less typing involved :-)
There are a bunch more, but nothing that really covers my early experience with Unix. Something about "common tools of the late 1970s line-oriented computing environments" might be an interesting subject, we'll see . . .
Back in the day, it's amazing how much code one could write in these relatively primitive line-oriented editors (ed on Unix systems, editors like SOS and EDT on DEC operating systems, and so on).