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From: cbh@bankersnet.co.uk (Chris Hedley)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.misc,comp.unix.bsd.misc,alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: On the Naming of UNIX Things
Date: Fri, 15 Nov 1996 16:51:06 GMT
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In article <328cb5ad.2528560@news.msn.fullfeed.com>,
Jay.Jaeger@msn.fullfeed.com (Jay R. Jaeger) writes:
>>So it was called "grpep", then shortened to "grep" after Bill Gates made
>>a hilarious typo in the Xenix-86 version at a trade show. The actual details
>>were hushed up, and they changed the command to make sure it never happened
>>again.
>>
>
> Baloney. grep existed in Unix 6th edition, cir. 1976, long before
> there was a PC. I'd have to check, but I'd bet it was even in the
> 5th edition, a year before. Or was your explanation intended to be
> flame bait?
>
> It is, of course, as others here have pointed out, really derived from
> the "ed" command sequence: g/<regular expression/p, i.e. Globally
> search for a Regular Expression, and Print.
>
> Sigh, these folks that started on PC's need some real history of
> computing education ;-)
I'm sorry, you're totally wrong. GREP was ported to UNIX from its
original inception on NT. IBM's NT system took the basics for its
GREP command from a file scanning program on VMS called "GROPE", but
they had to change the spelling to the phonetic version (as pronounced
in Ulan-Bator, the site of IBM's head office) of "grep" for copyright
reasons.
The GROPE program, along with the rest of VMS, was written for Sega's
PDP-10 "mainframe" (a rackmounted PC) back in 1988 by Bill Gates and
Alan Turing when they worked together sweeping floors at a Burger King
in Istanbul.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Chris.