Hmm, not quite the same. I myself write all my code (and most of my other documents) in the editor "vim" (based on "vi"). The vi editor was created in 1976, so its pedigree is even _older_ than Wordstar.

But, you see, there's a difference. Wordstar is a commercial product; only MicroPro could legally make changes to the software. So, when MicroPro went belly-up, all work on Wordstar ended. Wordstar is, therefore, dead.

Vim is an open-source product. Anyone who has an interest can pick up the source code and make changes to it. Even if Bram Moolenaar suddenly did a 180 and tried to close off access to all the code he's written over the years, he legally couldn't do it. Vim cannot die in the manner that closed-source software does. And so, Vim has the advantage of decades of development work behind it, and continues to have bugfixes and new features up to this day. (Also, vim has been ported to pretty much every OS I can think of, and ships by default with most distributions of Linux and with every copy of Apple's OS X.)


Back to the topic at hand; I use my N900 for my portable computing needs, because it conveniently provides the shells, editors, and other tools that I use daily on my Mac Minis, and on my Linux boxes. That I've used on my laptops. That I've used on the servers at work. That I used back in college.

Certainly I could jailbreak an IOS device, or root an Android, to get the kind of functionality that comes for free with the N900. (And I imagine I probably will one of these days -- I've finally picked up an Android device to hack on.) But why go through all that hassle? The N900 does what I want from the instant I first turn it on, without mucking around in the OS or constantly fighting against the manufacturer...