Pretty sure q came first and was resurrected later. The system, applied
rigorously, was to pick something that worked without conflict each time.
Ken usually picked.

-rob


On Wed, Feb 5, 2020 at 8:50 PM Angelo Papenhoff <aap@papnet.eu> wrote:

> On 05/02/20, Rob Pike wrote:
> > Also a side note about vi: Plan 9 had another program with that name.
> > http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/vi. The 'v' meant mips for obscure but
> > consistent reasons. Yet another reason the command was pronounced V.I.
> > regardless of its function.
>
> Actually now i wonder, was there a system behind those characters?
> These are all i could find (roughly in order of appearance):
> 2 68020
> 8 i386
> v mips
> k sparc
> z hobbit
> 6 i960
> x AT&T 3210
> 1 68000
> 9 AMD 29000
> q ppc
> 7 alpha
> 5 ARM (7500)
> 6 amd64
> 9 ppc64
> 0 mips little endian
>
> There's a '2' in '68020' and an '8' in '386' and maybe i can understand
> 'k' as sparK, but why is v mips or q powerpc?
>
> aap
>