[TUHS] On computerese

[Henry Bent]

On Mon, 30 Sept 2024 at 16:01, Dan Halbert <halbert at halwitz.org> wrote:

> 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.
>

That definitely tracks with an outlier I turned up in my search of sources,
an "apropos.doc" that appears on the CSRG DVD with the sources for CMU
Emacs.  It's just a list of mappings from commands to keybindings, for
example:

...
delete-next-character        ^D
delete-next-word             ESC-D
delete-other-windows         ^X1
delete-previous-character    ^H
delete-previous-character    RUBOUT
...

I'm not particularly an Emacs person, but it looks like it could be the
output from an "apropos" command, or perhaps the input to it.

-Henry
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