Hacker News

points by schoen 1 day ago | 0 comments

I often thought that a cat could be named /bin/cat. After all, many cats seem to enjoy being in boxes or bins!

You're likely aware of this, and certainly Don is, but for those unaware, PIP was the RSX-11 and CP/M equivalent to /bin/cat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Interchange_Program

[–] DonHopkins 1 day ago

I'm going to name my next cat after my favorite Apple ][ DOS command:

]CATALOG

And my next dog after the way you warm restart DOS after you hit RESET with Integer Basic ROMs and get thrown into Woz's system monitor:

*3D0G

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_DOS#Technical_details

[–] jsrcout 1 day ago

Awesome. I wasn't sure if anyone else remembered those. Formative stuff for me :-)

[–] kragen 9 hours ago

Probably most of the people who used them a lot at the time would be 55–70-year-old men in the US today. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html suggests that 88% of US men who would be 55 if they were still alive are in fact still alive, and 72% of US men who would be 70 today if they were still alive are in fact still alive.

So probably three-quarters of the people who remembered them in, say, 01990, still remember them. You remember all those guys, and the occasional gal, you saw at computer stores and user group meetings at the time? Most of them are still alive, and most of them still remember them. They're just harder to find because places like HN have filled up with MBAs.

(I remember ]CATALOG but not *3D0G.)

[–] hobo123 11 hours ago

But when you talk editor names, you should really rather name it "Ed".

Ed is the standard Unix text editor.

[–] petepete 1 day ago

And his brothers /bin/bzcat, /bin/pacat, /bin/netcat and /bin/sqfscat.