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Sometime around 1980-81 I had a part time job while an undergraduate in college doing system programming/admin for the Caltech High Energy Physics department. Rob Pike was the system programmer/admin before me when he was a grad student in high energy physics, but he left to go work at Bell Labs. One day another student, Karl Heuer, and I both were engaging in the common programmer pastime of complaining about the screen editors of the day and saying we could write something better. Somehow this turned into a competition, and we both spent all night racing against each other writing our editors. It was mostly silent except for the typing, interrupted by the occasional announcement of some feature that was now working to hopefully rattle the other. In the morning the other student system programmer/admin, Norman Wilson, got in and saw what Karl and I had been up to. Norman mentioned this in an email to Rob Pike. His response was something close to this: > Everyone writes a screen editor. It's easy to do and makes them feel important. Tell them to work on something useful. It was only a couple years or so later that Rob Pike wrote a screen editor. I wonder if it made him feel important? :-)