(Re:)^50 Use of ``vi'' for business office word-processing

[h.cohen]

The Bell Labs study mentioned here was by Tom Landauer et al.
They taught a subset of ed to non-computer types with the existing
command names, irrelevant command names, and (I'm not sure
about this last) counter-intuitive command names.  Note that the
ed commands *were not changed*.  Different names were associated
with the *same* one-letter mnemonics (s, a, ...).
Results suggested that the word associated with a one-letter command was
not important.  This generates some interesting hypotheses a propos
the current discussion, but generalization of the results obviously
requires some caution.
Harvey S. Cohen, AT&T-ISL, Lincroft, NJ, mtuxo!hsc