Cool, the first distro I mentioned in my post was Slackware, in 1995. It came on cdrom with a book I picked up at the time. I think it took me a couple of months of using it to realize the vi I was using was elvis, a clone that Patrick shipped with Slackware by default. After reading about Vim and Bram I realized I had to install Vim separately.
I'm back to Slackware these days after moving away from Debian because, well there were reasons. Interestingly when I read this article this morning I realized that true to form Slackware is still using 7.4 so I downloaded the source and am compiling 8 this evening after work.
Thanks Bram indeed! :-)