🚀 go-pugleaf

>man page gave the breakdown of biff as "Be Informed iF mail arrives and who
>it is From" (ack), but apparently conventional wisdom has it that biff was
>the name of the programmer's dog.

Heidi Stettner's dog, biff, who barked when the mail came. When
Armando Stettner (no relation) got a dog he named it Heidi.

>As to finger, however, I was quite stumped.  Programs with this name and
>function appear on a variety of systems.  I had always assumed it came from
>the old crime movie usage ("Boiz, I think Bugzy has squealed to the cops and
>fingered Guido as the one who iced the boss..."), and not the vulgar.  In
>other words, finger :-- to point out, describe in detail.  Does anyone have
>any better guesses?

Someone probably has the truth but finger certainly goes back at least
as far as the mid-late 70's on ITS systems. Although it probably
doesn't pre-date Unix it didn't appear on Unix until the early 80's
(in any generaly distribution, no doubt someone had hacked something
like it onto a local Unix earlier, I think I did one of the first
widely distributed finger daemons and network extensions of finger for
Unix just after 4.2 with TCP came out (the 4.2 finger didn't support
remote finger), around 1983 tho "fing" came out shortly thereafter and
ended up being more commonly used.)

The silly name even has a DARPA RFC for the finger protocol, I'd bet
the image of pointing out someone is correct.
-- 
        -Barry Shein

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