On Wed, 4 Nov 1998, Anand Buddhdev wrote:
> Just out of curiosity, what does "exim" mean, and how was the name chosen?
> Normally, mailers tend to have names like *mail or *mailer, but exim is
> very different.
Before Philip (or someone else who actually knows) answers, I wouldn't
mind taking a guess:
EXperimental Internet Mail
I have very little confidence in that guess. That sounds more like a
working name for some MUA, but not an MTA.
Let's just hope that Philip doesn't have a dog called "exim" that brings
him his mail.[1]
-j
Notes:
[1] The name of the program "biff" is a well known bit of Unix lore.
The program checks a local mail box every minute or so
and writes a message to your terminal when new mail arrives. It's
largely unneeded in the POP/IMAP world with mail client constantly
open. As with most useful programs, the author wrote it for himself
and didn't pay much attention to naming it since it was only for
his usage. He named it after his dog, "Biff" which always barked
when the postman came to the house. A friend noticed the program
and asked whether he could use it. Pretty soon it was in general
use around Berkeley and other early BSD systems before the name
could be changed.
This story might be apocrophyl, but it is old. I heard it around
1981, when using what was probably BSD 2.* Whether true or not, it
certainly is plausible.
--
Jeffrey Goldberg +44 (0)1234 750 111 x 2826
Cranfield Computer Centre FAX 751 814
J.Goldberg@??? http://WWW.Cranfield.ac.uk/public/cc/cc047/
Relativism is the triumph of authority over truth, convention over justice.
--
*** Exim information can be found at
http://www.exim.org/ ***
