Re: unix acronyms -collecting a list?

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Article #4477

#4477

From: Joel Ray Holveck
Date: Fri, 16 May 1997 00:00

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token@altair.franken.de (Matthias Buelow) writes:

>> biff ?? Does it mean anything?
> Biff was a dog on the Berkeley campus who was known to bark at the
> postman. :)

I understand that although Biff was, in fact, a dog on Berkeley
campus, he did not bark at the postman.  From the Jargon File, version
4.0.0:

:biff: /bif/ /vt./  To notify someone of incoming mail.  From
   the BSD utility `biff(1)', which was in turn named after a
   friendly golden Labrador who used to chase frisbees in the halls at
   UCB while 4.2BSD was in development.  There was a legend that it
   had a habit of barking whenever the mailman came, but the author of
   `biff' says this is not true.  No relation to {B1FF}.

A fun place to verify some of these things is in
alt.folklore.computer.

Happy hacking,
joelh

-- 
http://www.wp.com/piquan --- Joel Ray Holveck --- joelh@gnu.ai.mit.edu
All my opinions are my own, not the Free Software Foundation's.

Second law of programming:
Anything that can go wrong wi
sendmail: segmentation violation -- core dumped

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From: Joel Ray Holveck <joelh@gnu.ai.mit.edu>
Subject: Re: unix acronyms -collecting a list?
Date: 1997/05/16
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