13 Dec
2020
13 Dec
'20
1:10 a.m.
As the inventor of "at", I can tell you that cron existed for quite some
time, but was little used. An arcane set of manipulations was required
to get things to run, and there was little demand. But there were a
bunch of us all using the same PDP-11, and I wanted to add a job to run
at 3AM that would be a bit of CPU hog. I struggled and finally got
something to work. And thinking about it, I realized that what I really
wanted to say was
at 3am command-line
I made a shell script that did the bare minimum and advertised it on
motd. Within a day or two, Dennis grabbed it and made sure that the job
would run in the proper directory with the correct permissions, and
otherwise behave the way I wanted it to.
As many of you know, the rule with Unix was "you can touch anything, but
if you change it, you own it." This was a great way to turn arguments
into progress. I think I "owned" at for at most two days. I had a
similar experience with
spell--I think my ownership of spell lasted about 2 weeks.
In both cases, I was delighted to provide the "sperm of the idea" and
let someone else carry and deliver the baby.
---
On 2020-12-11 18:56, Dave Horsfall wrote:
On Wed, 9 Dec 2020, Clem Cole wrote:
My point is that "intelligent design"
doesn't necessarily guarantee
goodness or for that matter,complete logical thinking.
Don't mention "intelligent design" in my hearing; it's just a fad
term for creation theory...
Look at Unix, for example :-) It didn't so much spring from the brow
of Zeus i.e. Ken and Dennis, but has since evolved over decades (and
it's still recognisable as Unix).
-- Dave, using Unix since Edition 5