UNIX history made easy

[John F. Haugh II]

In article <Sep.30.21.29.38.1989.9534 at elbereth.rutgers.edu> bschwart at elbereth.rutgers.edu (Not a Rich Republican) writes:
>In article <20226 at usc.edu> gazit at cs.duke.edu (Hillel) writes:
>>In article <IZ9Hkde00WB58=V2pf at andrew.cmu.edu> mg32+ at andrew.cmu.edu
>>(Michael Ginsberg) writes:
>>
>>>what DOES grep stand for???
>
>It is named after the author of the program:  Gregula Rex Pression, Ph.D.

No, it is named after the names of the four authors who worked on
the original regular expression matching code for the UNIX editor
'ed'.

Their names are Gregior, Ritchie, Ebersol, and Pike.  Micheal
Gregior is the creator of the UNIX regular expression matching
grammar [ he invent the *, ., and [] syntax BTW ]  Dennis Ritchie
we know all about.  Ralph Ebersol [ who died two years later on
the NYC to DC Metroliner at age 24 ] was the youngest person to
ever work at Murray Hill on PWB UNIX and 'ed' was just one of
his many contributions, his least famous being the `tacky bit'
on directories.

Pike, of Kernighan and Pike fame [ The UNIX Programming Environment ],
write quite a few of the UNIX system utilities.  He was probably the
number four UNIX programmer involved in the evolution of 7th Edition
UNIX, just after Ritchie, Thompson, and Kernighan.  He and Dennis
worked together on the 'pr' text formatting utility.

These were just four of Al Aho's employees [ Aho, BTW is the 'A'
in 'AWK' - Aho, Weinberg, and Kernighan ] in the late seventies.
A little known piece of trivial is that sales of Aho's 'Dragon
Book' financed the purchase of the original PDP-11 Thompson and
Ritchie worked on.
-- 
John F. Haugh II                        +-Things you didn't want to know:------
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