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Comment by throw0101a

8 hours ago

I.e.,

    NAME
       biff -- be notified if mail arrives and who it is from
    
    […]
    
    HISTORY
       The biff command appeared in 4.0BSD.  It was named  after  the  dog  of
       Heidi Stettner. He died in August 1993, at 15.

* https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=biff

    Eric Cooper, a student contemporary to Foderero and 
    Stettner, reports that the dog would bark at the mail 
    carrier,[4][5] making it a natural choice for the name 
    of a mail notification system. Stettner herself 
    contradicts this.[3][6]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biff_(Unix)

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throw0101a

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dcminter  5 hours ago

From the excellent "A Quarter Century of UNIX" (by the late Peter H. Salus):

Heidi would bring her dog with her to class and to her office. He was a very friendly dog, and a lot of the students enjoyed throwing a ball for him down the corridor to fetch. He even had his picture on the bulletin board with the graduate students: the legend read that he was working on his Ph.Dog. John decided to name the program after the dog: Biff. According to Heidi, John and Bill Joy then spent a lot of time trying to compose an explanation for biff - they came up with "Be notified if mail arrived." Biff, who died in August 1993, at 15, once got a B in a compiler class. According to Heidi, the story of Biff barking at the mailman is a scurrilous canard.

One of my favourite bits of trivia from that excellent book, but hardly anyone I bump into these days knows anything about that kind of multi-user Unix experience/environment these days. I barely caught any of it myself.