While browsing thru some old directories I ran across the following file, which seemed fitting given Dennis Ritchie’s recent death. It’s a welcome message displayed to all users when they first logged into Software Tool & Die’s public access unix machine called world.std.com.

From uunet!research.att.com!dmr  Tue Oct 17 03:35:50 1989
Return-Path: <uunet!research.att.com!dmr>
Received: from uunet.UUCP by world.std.com (4.0/SMI-4.0)
	id AA27107; Tue, 17 Oct 89 03:35:50 EDT
From: uunet!research.att.com!dmr
Received: from inet.att.com by uunet.uu.net (5.61/1.14) with SMTP
	id AA15993; Tue, 17 Oct 89 03:21:50 -0400
Message-Id: <8910170721.AA15993@uunet.uu.net>
Date: Tue, 17 Oct 89 03:15:37 EDT
To: msgs@world.std.com
Subject: printf

	"Hello, world.std.com!\n"

		Dennis Ritchie

I got an account on The World in the early 1990’s and remember seeing this message and being amused and wondering if it was real. It is really from Dennis Ritchie, as confirmed in The World’s founder Barry Shein‘s euloblog for Ritchie.

The thing I notice now about the message is that it took 20 minutes to travel from New Jersey to Boston! Ahh, back in the UUCP days…