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Comment by dhruvmittal | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating, never knew the biff one.

Could it be this was the name inspiration for Mutt?

‘As development progressed, features found in other popular clients such as PINE and MUSH have been added, the result being a hybrid, or "mutt."’

http://www.mutt.org/

It’s great to have a list of what things stand for, but someone needs to make a list of all the puns! A few more that I can think of:

more -> less

pico (pine composer) -> nano

sh (Bourne) -> bash (Bourne again)

yacc -> bison

Could vim be considered a pun? It's just vi improved, but vim itself means "energy / enthusiasm"

Vim used to include a line from Sherman and Sherman's song:

   The wonderful thing about tiggers
   They're loaded with vim and vigor

elm (ELectronic Mail) -> pine (Pine Is Not Elm)

ETA:

apache (a patchy server)[1]

emacs of course is Editor MACroS, but it's got a few community-provided backronyms, I'm partial to eight megabytes and constantly swapping and escape-meta-alt-shift.

[1] http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/open_source_rewrite_hist...

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