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> [...] 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?

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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.

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!

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.

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