At 2:15 PM EST on February 17 Erik Jacobsen sent off:
> Or, from the OpenBSD man pages:
>
> The biff command appeared in 4.0BSD. biff was Heidi Stettner's dog.
Years ago a friend was forced to use Unix at work and then turned off by biff.
She had spent some time looking for an email notifier, and eventually found
biff, with the explanation of its name in the man page. She bitterly railed
against any OS where the programmers would be allowed to choose command names
using such obscure lines of thought as a dog fetching mail or newspapers.
But biff doesn't *fetch* mail, it just barks at the mailman. *mutt* fetches
mail. And fetchmail catches frisbees in its mouth ;-)
Other Canadians on the list have probably read Farley Mowat's book "The Dog Who
Wouldn't Be" and know that Mutt, the title character, can do anything.
--
Pollutocracy, n.: Rule by stinking rich folk and badly polluting corporations.
- Hamish Wilson
Robert I. Reid <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://astro.utoronto.ca/~reid/
PGP Key: http://astro.utoronto.ca/~reid/pgp.html
