Re: [TUHS] etymology of cron

On Sun, 3 Jan 2016, Ronald Natalie wrote: I also looked at Muuss's own story long ago on his webpage. And see corresponding bug entry from December 1983 and the same unattributed bug fix (revision 6.3) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/net.unix-wizards/Dzh14xPrbiA/XAY… https://github.com/weiss/original-bsd/commit/195492fc6b05470d246fbedd4d2cf5… So his own story says impetus of his ping is a meeting in Norway in July 1983. This year may be off. RFC 828 of August 1982, said a planned IFIP technical committee meeting would be held in Norway in 1982. His story says in December 1983 he quickly coded up his Unix ping but needed kernel support for it to work and required some hardware fixes before his "first" ping packet. But his bug report (linked above) recorded as bugs/4.2BSD/sys/38 seems to suggest he already had a "ping" program that could have been in the 4.2BSD release (which came out earlier in 1983). I wonder what triggered the 20% packet loss with ping and maybe always was there since his year-earlier implementation (or maybe some other kernel change broke it or maybe he extended his ping to be able to show that). His kernel fix was integrated at CSRG the next month (1984) and his ping was not added to BSD SCCS until April 1985. That ping revision had the comments saying it was December, 1983 and for "4.2". The confusing thing is why notice the 20% loss even on software loopback driver (per bug ticket) when his story says other hardware needed to be fixed too before first ping. I think he may have skipped some of the history when he wrote his story. (I tried to write this story up in my BSD history book but now became more confused :)