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Comment by terminado | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: according to unsubstantiated UNIX lore, "rm" is NOT short-hand for "remove" but rather, it stands for the initials of the developer that wrote the original implementation, Robert Morris.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morris_(cryptographer)

I have no proof of this, but through oral tradition, such a tale has been relayed to me. Believe whatever you will.

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Considering the naming scheme of other basic unix utilities, I'll chalk this one up to "fun coincidence" rather than actual truth.

Alternatively, we could make "Robert"/"Bob" a euphemism for nuking files ;) "Yeah I Bob'd the whole build directory" "Bombed?", "No, Bob'd. Like deleted... never mind"

Obligatory Bobby Tables reference [0].

[0] https://xkcd.com/327/

Some people in computing have definitely gotten their initials into wide distribution:

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

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

("PK" is not only the beginning of ZIP files but also of, among other things, ODT, DOCX, and JAR files, which are all in turn implemented as ZIP files.)

I was curious if this was true, and asked. The answer I got was http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2018-April/013510.html and it appears that this isn't true.

Specifically the original man page (http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1/man/man1/rm....), dated November, 1971, shows Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson as the original authors.

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