[TUHS] On computerese

[Dan Halbert]

On 9/30/24 15:15, Henry Bent wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Sept 2024 at 14:08, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>     This makes me wonder when the `apropos` command was introduced; surely
>     the name was also somewhat of an obscure joke ("what is apropos of
>     listing a directory?" is not exactly the phrase that springs
>     immediately to mind when wondering how to list a directory).
>
>
> Looks like it was introduced in 2BSD, written by Bill Joy, though the 
> 4.4BSD manpage claims that it was introduced in 3BSD.  Neither the BSD 
> source nor manpage are particularly enlightening about the choice of name.

I was one of the Berkeley grad students in the office with Bill Joy 
around this time. I think the name probably  come from the "apropos" 
command in Emacs. That command is mentioned here: 
https://worrydream.com/refs/Stallman_1979_-_EMACS,_The_Extensible,_Customizable,_Self-Documenting_Display_Editor.pdf, 
which is dated June 1979, but the Emacs command existed before that 
date. The Berkeley source code is dated 1979: 
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2BSD/src/apropos.c

I had used Emacs at MIT as an undergraduate. Bill would sometimes ask 
me, "how do they do that in Emacs", or ITS, and then riff on a feature 
and put it into vi or whatever. Whether I suggested an "apropos" Unix 
command or someone wanted something like that, or I said, "sounds like 
'apropos' in Emacs", I don't remember.

Dan H
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