Or, from the OpenBSD man pages:
The biff command appeared in 4.0BSD. biff was Heidi Stettner's dog. He
died in August 1993, at 15.
which suggests an earlier etymology than the hacker's dictionary.
--
-e
On Wed, Feb 16, 2000 at 10:12 AM, Thomas Roessler ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) typed:
> 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/
>
