On 2000-02-16 15:28:43 +0800, Sverre Slotte wrote:
> I remember having read ("Life with Unix" by somebody Ressler?)
> that Biff was a dog who lived with its owner in Berkeley (in the
> beginning of the 1980s?). Biff used to bark at the mailman.
> Further down the hall from lived some of the BSD-hackers, and
> they dedided to call the mail-notification program "biff".
>From the jargon file:
| :biff: /bif/ /vt./ To notify someone of incoming mail. From
| the BSD utility `biff(1)', which was in turn named after a
| friendly golden Labrador who used to chase frisbees in the halls
| at UCB while 4.2BSD was in development. There was a legend that
| it had a habit of barking whenever the mailman came, but the
| author of `biff' says this is not true. No relation to {B1FF}.
--
http://www.guug.de/~roessler/
