I drop by /. once or twice a year... definitely not the same as it used to be. Even remember when they added accounts, I ended up with a sub-400 uid even though it felt like I took a while to bother.
Kinda funny they stil have aim/icq fields on your user info page...
Google literally didn't exist when I first was thrust into vim (well, vi) a large number of years ago ;) Pretty sure I eventually gave up and closed the terminal window - dialed directly into the university's unix server. Can't remember which version of unix it was, though.
It was probably the default editor for tin, the usenet client I was using. At least pine used pico as its editor which was a bit more friendly.