Last summer I dug out a 16 years old backup disk: https://www.version2.dk/blog/dekryptering-16-aar-gammel-harddisk-1090958 (Danish)
Today I went through some of the data. And imagine my delight when I found an old version of Parallel (way before it was called GNU). It is dated 2002-01-06. Here is the full(!) source code: #!/usr/bin/perl $processes=shift; chomp(@jobs=<>); for (@jobs) { $jobnr++; push @makefile, (".PHONY : job$jobnr\n", "job$jobnr :\n", "\t$_\n"); } unshift @makefile, "all : ",(map { "job$_ " } 1 .. $jobnr),"\n"; open (MAKE, "| make -k -f - -j $processes") || die; print MAKE @makefile; close MAKE; It even works with no changes: (echo "sleep 2; echo a"; echo "sleep 1; echo b") | parallel 2 The emacs backup file (parallel~ also dated 2002-01-06) contains: #!/bin/sh cat > /tmp/$$ <<EOF all: ls EOF make -f /tmp/$$ -j 3 which clearly is a test of making a Makefile on the fly, but which is not a working version of Parallel. So I am convinced the above actually *is* the very first version of Parallel. Since COVID ruined the 10 year anniversary of Parallel becoming GNU Parallel, maybe we should celebrate the 20 year anniversary of Parallel next year? /Ole