that 2nd ref is mine, too. marc On Friday, December 25, 2015, David <david(a)kdbarto.org> wrote:

To update this thread: The wording from my last edit to the Wikipedia article on cron is still there, although one of the references has been removed, and the phrase "better source needed" has been added. That part is OK with me, and I actually agree with it--a better source *is* needed. But at least the article at this point no longer says that cron is an acronym. [To Greg Lehey: As anyone can edit the article, you could could add a paragraph about bogus claims as to what cron means if you want, but, in my opinion, the article is better without this distracting discussion.] On Fri, Dec 25, 2015 at 3:22 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote:

On Saturday, 2 January 2016 at 12:56:35 -0700, Marc Rochkind wrote: Yes, I have edited it already. I'm biding my time in the hope that TEDickey will go away. And I still firmly believe that the incorrect claims need to be mentioned. I said all this before: Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)FreeBSD.org for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft MUA reports problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua

On 2016-01-02 20:26, Ronald Natalie wrote: Well, the source code for the fuzzball version of PING[1a] calls it "P i n g - packet inter net groper". The fuzzball manual[1b] calls it: The Packet InterNet Groper (PING) is an internet measurement and debugging tool. Mills's 1983 RFC889[2] calls the original PING Packet InterNet Groper. There is his claim[3] he invented it in 1979. Where it seems Muus preferred to keep the sonar analogy pure for ping(8) Mills liked to play with words all the time. [1a] http://web.archive.org/web/20131020063249/http://malarky.udel.edu/~dmills/d… [1b] http://web.archive.org/web/20141108042310/http://malarky.udel.edu/~dmills/d… [2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc889 [3] http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multimedia/misc/tcp_ip/8702.mm.www/0342.html

There were some inaccuracies in that piece as well which is why history is sometimes fun. It was definitely December 82 Not 83 because it was a few days before LINK 0 was going to be shut off on the APRANET and we were scrambling to convert our machines to TCP. As Clem and I have discussed in a side conversation, it was Gurwitz’s contribution to 4.1a rather than 4.2a (was there a 4.2a even)? I remember pouring over the 4.1a/4.1c/4.2 stuff doing the user mode conversions for our machines. I really disliked the berknet host table format (alas this has persisted longer than ping) and there was not yet a program that converted the table that the NIC distributed to that format. I rewrote rhost (and it’s related functions) to read the NIC host tables directly. I also wrote a program to periodically retrieve the table from the NIC. Later someone provided a program to build a BSD-style host table from NIC table. We inadvertantly blew up this program when we added a machine, coincidentally called BRL-ZAP to the table. It was the first ethernet-connected laser printer (an Imagen Imprint-10) we had. I just put 68000 as the CPU type without thinking about it. I got some irate emails from people thinking I’d crashed their program intentionally given the hostname. Apparently the conversion program used YACC and an incorrect grammer to parse the table. They had assumed that machine types always began with a letter. To me the fact that they had used YACC was overkill (my direct reading program didn’t do so), the file was essentially a bunch of fields separated with COLONS (and in some fields subdivided by commas). There was some file that every UNIX machine was already parsing continually without the need for a grammar similarly formatted (/etc/passwd anybody?).

Ronald Natalie scripsit: Indeed, any word older than about 1890 is not an acronym, with a few Hebrew and Arabic exceptions like Tanakh, Rambam, _abjad_. POTUS and SCOTUS were codewords devised in 1879 and meant to be used on the wire only, but occasionally leaked into print. Initialisms like SPQR are much older, with English-language examples like O.K. and N.G. dating to the 1840s. It's not clear when A.W.O.L. switched from an initialism to an acronym proper, probably WWI; the same ambiguity applies to O.U.D.S. The word _acronym_ itself is first recorded in 1940 (borrowed from German), and they certainly had taken off by that time. The oldest ones consistently written as an ordinary word (no capitals, no periods) are probably _radar_ and _snafu_ (both 1941), though some older ones lose their caps at a later date, like the now-obscure MUSA (multiple unit steerable antenna) and W/Op (wireless operator), later _musa_ and _wop_. The later _loran_, _fubar_, _jato_ also fall into this category. "Rip track" (1892) may be the oldest retronym in English; it's a stretch of railroad track used to repair rolling stock, later reinterpreted as "Repair In Place". -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org You escaped them by the will-death and the Way of the Black Wheel. I could not. --Great-Souled Sam

On Sun, 3 Jan 2016, Ronald Natalie wrote: I also looked at Muuss's own story long ago on his webpage. And see corresponding bug entry from December 1983 and the same unattributed bug fix (revision 6.3) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/net.unix-wizards/Dzh14xPrbiA/XAY… https://github.com/weiss/original-bsd/commit/195492fc6b05470d246fbedd4d2cf5… So his own story says impetus of his ping is a meeting in Norway in July 1983. This year may be off. RFC 828 of August 1982, said a planned IFIP technical committee meeting would be held in Norway in 1982. His story says in December 1983 he quickly coded up his Unix ping but needed kernel support for it to work and required some hardware fixes before his "first" ping packet. But his bug report (linked above) recorded as bugs/4.2BSD/sys/38 seems to suggest he already had a "ping" program that could have been in the 4.2BSD release (which came out earlier in 1983). I wonder what triggered the 20% packet loss with ping and maybe always was there since his year-earlier implementation (or maybe some other kernel change broke it or maybe he extended his ping to be able to show that). His kernel fix was integrated at CSRG the next month (1984) and his ping was not added to BSD SCCS until April 1985. That ping revision had the comments saying it was December, 1983 and for "4.2". The confusing thing is why notice the 20% loss even on software loopback driver (per bug ticket) when his story says other hardware needed to be fixed too before first ping. I think he may have skipped some of the history when he wrote his story. (I tried to write this story up in my BSD history book but now became more confused :)