I was convinced this was a moment of retardation at first.

The machines are all solaris 10, various updates and various hardware.
Mission was to copy and paste a line in vi say 500 times. I tried the
usual yy, to copy the line I wanted, then 500p

It only pasted one line. Tried a bunch of other machines, no dice.

Had another person try the same task, they failed as well and were like
WTF is going on here.

Talked to the programmers, they only use vim, where this does work. I come
from a BSD world, where vi is really nvi, and this works just fine.

Is there a reason this pretty basic behavior doens't work on the sun
standard vi, or is there something that would make it not work?