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#! rnews 2377 bsd Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!news.Hawaii.Edu!news.uoregon.edu!newsfeed.orst.edu!news.orst.edu!news.cs.indiana.edu!mcmcnews.er.usgs.gov!usgsnews.usgs.gov!news.er.usgs.gov!jobone!eccdb1.pms.ford.com!usenet From: Clinton Pierce <cpierce1@ford.com> Newsgroups: comp.unix.misc,comp.unix.bsd.misc,alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: On the Naming of UNIX Things Date: Mon, 11 Nov 1996 13:53:17 -0500 Organization: Ford Motor Company Lines: 27 Message-ID: <3287761D.41C6@ford.com> References: <55vhpf$q3o@mail1.wg.waii.com> <328386bc.112278367@news.ov.com> <5603r1$b80@news.ox.ac.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: cp501.fsic.ford.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0 (X11; I; IRIX64 6.2 IP28) To: Benjamin Hutchings <worc0223@sable.ox.ac.uk> Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.misc:26293 comp.unix.bsd.misc:1471 alt.folklore.computers:124432 Benjamin Hutchings wrote: > > In article <328386bc.112278367@news.ov.com>, > Pete Barber <pete.barber@openv.co.uk> wrote: > >biff - dunno > > I heard that Biff was the name of Ken Thompson's dog, which would bark > loudly whenever the mailman came to deliver, but this could be another UL. Taken (without Permission) from "A Quarter Century of UNIX", which the starter of this thread oughta try reading...would save him a lot of work: [...]John Fodero, a graduate student at Berkeley in the summer of 1980, wrote a program that checked whether new mail had arrived. It would tell a user "you have new mail". At the time, Heidi Stettner worked in Evans Hall, prior to beginning graduate study. Heidi would bring her dog with her to and to her office. He was a very friendly dog,and a lot of the students enjoyed throwing a ball down the corridor for him to fetch. He even had his picture on the bulletin board with the graduate students: the legend read that he was working on his Ph.Dog. John decided to name the program after the dog: Biff. According to Heidi, John and Bill Joy then spent a lot of time trying to compose an explanation for biff--they came up with "Be notified if mail arrives." Biff, who died in August 1993, at 15, once got a B in a compiler class. According to Heidi, the story of Biff barking at the mailman is a scurrilous canard.