From: scj@yaccman.com
To: Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org>
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Were cron and at done at the same time? Or one before the other?
Date: Sat, 12 Dec 2020 11:10:16 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <39d9058b9d69def8bfc1f58abaca928a@yaccman.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.2012121343150.25789@aneurin.horsfall.org>
As the inventor of "at", I can tell you that cron existed for quite some
time, but was little used. An arcane set of manipulations was required
to get things to run, and there was little demand. But there were a
bunch of us all using the same PDP-11, and I wanted to add a job to run
at 3AM that would be a bit of CPU hog. I struggled and finally got
something to work. And thinking about it, I realized that what I really
wanted to say was
at 3am command-line
I made a shell script that did the bare minimum and advertised it on
motd. Within a day or two, Dennis grabbed it and made sure that the job
would run in the proper directory with the correct permissions, and
otherwise behave the way I wanted it to.
As many of you know, the rule with Unix was "you can touch anything, but
if you change it, you own it." This was a great way to turn arguments
into progress. I think I "owned" at for at most two days. I had a
similar experience with
spell--I think my ownership of spell lasted about 2 weeks.
In both cases, I was delighted to provide the "sperm of the idea" and
let someone else carry and deliver the baby.
---
On 2020-12-11 18:56, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Dec 2020, Clem Cole wrote:
>
>> My point is that "intelligent design" doesn't necessarily guarantee
>> goodness or for that matter,complete logical thinking.
>
> Don't mention "intelligent design" in my hearing; it's just a fad
> term for creation theory...
>
> Look at Unix, for example :-) It didn't so much spring from the brow
> of Zeus i.e. Ken and Dennis, but has since evolved over decades (and
> it's still recognisable as Unix).
>
> -- Dave, using Unix since Edition 5
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-12-12 19:19 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 49+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-12-09 4:35 M Douglas McIlroy
2020-12-09 15:40 ` Clem Cole
2020-12-09 15:46 ` Niklas Karlsson
2020-12-09 16:01 ` Bakul Shah
2020-12-09 16:11 ` Clem Cole
2020-12-09 17:05 ` Bakul Shah
2020-12-09 17:42 ` Dan Stromberg
2020-12-09 23:46 ` Nemo Nusquam
2020-12-14 20:28 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-12-14 22:23 ` Thomas Paulsen
2020-12-14 23:04 ` Andrew Hume
2020-12-14 23:59 ` Harald Arnesen
2020-12-17 4:08 ` John Cowan
2020-12-15 2:57 ` Bakul Shah
2020-12-15 3:05 ` Warner Losh
[not found] ` <CAC20D2PXZY9aWgDf-RknROs6JbKEUjzbQ2BRzfTgTR07pXni3g@mail.g mail.com>
2020-12-09 16:04 ` John Foust
2020-12-09 16:40 ` Warner Losh
2020-12-09 16:53 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-12-09 16:58 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-12-09 19:58 ` Dan Cross
2020-12-09 20:30 ` Will Senn
2020-12-13 1:07 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-12-13 1:56 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-12-13 2:58 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-12-13 3:07 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-12-13 16:49 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-12-13 19:06 ` [TUHS] Were cron and at done at the same time? Or one before the other? [ really linux and filesystems ] Jon Steinhart
2020-12-13 3:02 ` [TUHS] Were cron and at done at the same time? Or one before the other? Dan Cross
2020-12-09 23:22 ` Bakul Shah
2020-12-09 23:44 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2020-12-09 23:51 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2020-12-10 0:19 ` [TUHS] Cole's Slaw John Gilmore
2020-12-10 0:29 ` Larry McVoy
2020-12-10 0:53 ` Erik E. Fair
2020-12-10 3:10 ` George Michaelson
2020-12-12 21:11 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-12-10 1:49 ` John Cowan
2020-12-10 2:12 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-12-12 2:56 ` [TUHS] Were cron and at done at the same time? Or one before the other? Dave Horsfall
2020-12-12 19:10 ` scj [this message]
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2020-12-13 2:02 Noel Chiappa
2020-12-13 2:08 ` Clem Cole
2020-12-09 19:25 Noel Chiappa
2020-12-08 18:11 ron minnich
2020-12-08 18:51 ` Mary Ann Horton
2020-12-08 19:05 ` Larry McVoy
2020-12-08 19:20 ` Michael Kjörling
2020-12-09 2:00 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-12-08 19:39 ` Clem Cole
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