zlacker

> [...] but it seems that many people still get most excited about the six months of work he put into rewriting cat [...]

Is it me or does 6 months seem like an awfully long time for re-writing such a small and simple program?

>>koyote+(OP)
It was a different era, one in which computers were a lot slower, source control was a lot more primitive, a lot of basic stuff was still being invented, but … yeah, I feel a lot better about my own productivity now!

>>koyote+(OP)
I would guess that it wasn’t his sole project for those 6 months, but rather something he kept incrementally improving until there was nothing left to improve.

>>rauhl+51
While I agree about productivity now (although rewriting a source for cat that is used decades later seems very productive), I think the above commenter has it correct that it was probably a side project that he worked on and released after 6 months and not so much the speed of the CPUs.