Were you using Windows XP Home, by any chance?
That tool was only included with Windows XP Professional, and even then, it was a command-line utility—so unless you were specifically looking for it or browsing through the %windir%\system32 directory, you probably wouldn’t have noticed it.
The article I referenced didn’t specify exactly which 32-bit versions it came with or when it was removed—it just mentioned that it was still included in 32-bit Windows after the DOS era. I didn’t write the article myself, so I can’t really speak to its accuracy.
Personally, I used that edline a lot back in the DOS days starting around 1985, until I switched to Notepad in Windows 95 and later to VIM when I moved to Linux after Windows 98. I never really checked for it in newer versions of Windows after that. A quick Google search confirmed it wasn’t included in XP Home, which would explain why you never saw it.
Link to the forum I found this information about XP in: http://murc.ws/forum/hardware/general-hardware-software/49698-omg-edlin-still-lives-in-xp#post755768
(edit: fixed a typo, added reference link)
My grandad, who was a farmer, used to say that the sellers of Roundup (the weed killer from roundup.com) would drink it during sales pitches to prove it wasn’t toxic to humans. So it wasn’t just farmers making questionable decisions—some of the misinformation came from the sellers themselves.
These days, it’s labeled as unsafe to use without gloves, and the high-concentration version sold to farmers isn’t even available to the general public anymore, at least where I live.
It just gives some context on why certain practices exist—bad or misleading information played a big role in shaping them and it is or was not always just the farmers alone.