Backspace doesn't work on vi in cygwin

Unfortunately I am forced to use windows at work. So I installed cygwin to run linux commands. While editing using my favourite editor vim; I realized that backspace doesn't work at all! However I found out a simple way to fix it. Add the following line to .vimrc or .virc

set backspace=indent,eol,start

Now backspace magically works!

Later I found out that this is not just in cygwin and is pretty common in unix based systems.