From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: tfb@tfeb.org (Tim Bradshaw)
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 19:28:19 +0100
Subject: [TUHS] Etymology of bc(1)
In-Reply-To: <20140912015415.DB69E18C09E@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
References: <20140912015415.DB69E18C09E@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <75643223-3F78-4DA9-8C8F-B80EA885710F@tfeb.org>

On 12 Sep 2014, at 02:54, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:

> Dude! Trying to answer questions about the origins of BC by looking at
> systems this late is like trying to learn Latin by studying Italian! :-)

[I'm not a latin scholar, so this is second-hand information.]

Curiously, I understand that studying Italian (or romance languages in general) turns out to be a fairly good way of learning about the Latin, where by "Latin" they mean the language people actually *spoke*, as opposed to the deformed version of it that some tiny minority of people wrote.

In a thousand years, it will also turn out that the best way to learn about Unix will be by reading the archives of some mailing list where people discussed their memories of the early versions of it.

--tim