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From: dmr@alice.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: The truth about cat
Message-ID: <7367@alice.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 17-Oct-87 04:47:55 EDT
Article-I.D.: alice.7367
Posted: Sat Oct 17 04:47:55 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 18-Oct-87 22:36:24 EDT
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill NJ
Lines: 27

Good grief.  I've been taunted enough.

cat	is short for catenate, is one of the approximately 10 primordial
	Unix commands, and has nothing to do with G{E}COS.

daemon	dates to CTSS whence it came to Multics and Unix.

runoff	was Saltzer's very early formatting program on CTSS.  Probably
	the later ASCII version on CTSS was called roff, but in any event,...

roff	is short for runoff.

nroff	is new roff.

troff	is typesetter roff; it predates nroff, and also the typesetter
	attached to CGOS.  The Comp Center downstairs, who ran the GCOS
	machines, saw our C/A/T (Computer Aided Typesetter, a product of
	Graphic Systems, later bought by Singer, later or maybe earlier
	bought by Librascope), were envious, and bought one too; in any event,
	C/A/T is not to be confused with the cat command.

the gcos field
	sometimes we sent printer output or batch jobs to the GCOS machines.
	The gcos field in the password file was a place to stash the
	information for the $IDENT card.  Not elegant.

			Dennis Ritchie