[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Jeremy C. Reed]

On Sun, 3 Jan 2016, Ronald Natalie wrote:

> > Thread "[ih] A laugh and a question" at
> > http://mailman.postel.org/pipermail/internet-history/2006-March/thread.html
> > was what inspired me to bring fuzzballs up in simh.
> 
> 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 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/XAYJHc7VSgcJ

https://github.com/weiss/original-bsd/commit/195492fc6b05470d246fbedd4d2cf5c77d1d63b9

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 :)