[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Jacob Goense]

On 2016-01-02 20:26, Ronald Natalie wrote:
> Well, Mike thinks.   UNIX needs a ping program as well so we can test
> things.     He banged it out in about an hour.    Mike joked years
> later about PING being an acronym for packet inter network groper but
> he was NEVER serious about it.

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/data/du0/PING.MAC
[1b] 
http://web.archive.org/web/20141108042310/http://malarky.udel.edu/~dmills/data/du0/HELP.TXT
[2]  https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc889
[3]  
http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multimedia/misc/tcp_ip/8702.mm.www/0342.html