historiques

Oui, j'ai pigé : c'est normal, Emacs est le plus ancien de tous,[...]

vim (ou plus précisément précurseur vi) est bien plus ancien :p

J'aurais juré que les deux sont de la même génération... Alors, je suis allé vérifier ce qu'en dit la fiche Wikipedia

Richard Stallman began work on GNU Emacs in 1984 to produce a free software alternative to the proprietary Gosling Emacs. GNU Emacs was initially based on Gosling Emacs, but Stallman's replacement of its Mocklisp interpreter with a true Lisp interpreter required that nearly all of its code be rewritten. This became the first program released by the nascent GNU Project. GNU Emacs is written in C and provides Emacs Lisp, also implemented in C, as an extension language. Version 13, the first public release, was made on March 20, 1985. The first widely distributed version of GNU Emacs was version 15.34, released later in 1985. Early versions of GNU Emacs were numbered as 1.x.x, with the initial digit denoting the version of the C core. The 1 was dropped after version 1.12, as it was thought that the major number would never change, and thus the numbering skipped from 1 to 13.

La première publication (pas le début d'écriture) de GNU Emacs est de 1985 ; et je pense que c'est à cette date qu'il est fait allusion ici. Car il ne faut pas oublier les « early implementations »

In the following years, programmers wrote a variety of Emacs-like editors for other computer systems. These included EINE (EINE Is Not EMACS) and ZWEI (ZWEI Was EINE Initially), which were written for the Lisp machine by Mike McMahon and Daniel Weinreb, and Sine (Sine Is Not Eine), which was written by Owen Theodore Anderson. Weinreb's EINE was the first Emacs written in Lisp. In 1978, Bernard Greenberg wrote Multics Emacs almost entirely in Multics Lisp at Honeywell's Cambridge Information Systems Lab. Multics Emacs was later maintained by Richard Soley, who went on to develop the NILE Emacs-like editor for the NIL Project, and by Barry Margolin. Many versions of Emacs, including GNU Emacs, would later adopt Lisp as an extension language.

James Gosling, who would later invent NeWS and the Java programming language, wrote Gosling Emacs in 1981. The first Emacs-like editor to run on Unix, Gosling Emacs was written in C and used Mocklisp, a language with Lisp-like syntax, as an extension language.

La première version Unix, qu'on doit à l'un des pères de Java, date lui de 1981.
Et il existait déjà une implémentation même pour Multics alors que Vi est apparu avec un BSD...
Outre Multics, les Emacs-like ont été présents dans de nombreux vieux systèmes temps partagés historiques.

The original Emacs, like TECO, ran only on the PDP-10 running ITS. Its behavior was sufficiently different from that of TECO that it could be considered a text editor in its own right, and it quickly became the standard editing program on ITS. Mike McMahon ported Emacs from ITS to the TENEX and TOPS-20 operating systems. Other contributors to early versions of Emacs include Kent Pitman, Earl Killian, and Eugene Ciccarelli. By 1979, Emacs was the main editor used in MIT's AI lab and its Laboratory for Computer Science.

Oui, Emacs remonte au PDP-10 avec ITS en 1976, comme il est dit en introduction.

The original EMACS was written in 1976 by David A. Moon and Guy L. Steele Jr. as a set of Editor MACroS for the TECO editor. It was inspired by the ideas of the TECO-macro editors TECMAC and TMACS.

Là, on pourrait penser que Emacs est l'aîné de Vi... bien que n'ayant mis les pieds dans Unix que plus tard (en 1981.) Mais l'autre fiche Wikipedia m'indique la même année de naissance sous son autre nom :

The original code for vi was written by Bill Joy in 1976, as the visual mode for a line editor called ex that Joy had written with Chuck Haley. Bill Joy's ex 1.1 was released as part of the first Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix release in March 1978. It was not until version 2.0 of ex, released as part of Second BSD in May 1979 that the editor was installed under the name "vi" (which took users straight into ex's visual mode), and the name by which it is known today. Some current implementations of vi can trace their source code ancestry to Bill Joy; others are completely new, largely compatible reimplementations.

Là où t'as raison, c'est si on se limite strictement au système Unix-like en résumant que la commande vi date de 1979 et la commande emacs de 1981.
Désolé pour le pavé, je suis un peu fan d'histoire d'informatique.

"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." ― David Hume