Friend who is not a software person sent me this tweet, which amused me as it did them. They asked if “runk” was real, which I assume not.
But what are some good examples of real ones like this? xz became famous for the hack of course, so i then read a bit about how important this compression algorithm is/was.
I mean, it was either Richard Stallman or Dennis Ritchie that created grep in an evening so that a buddy of his could do research on volumes of text that wouldn’t fit in the RAM of a PDP-11 (or similar machine. I’m telling this story from memory). It’s designed to do what you would do with the ancient text editor ed using the commands Global, Regular Expression, and Print. g re p. grep. Probably the most important piece of software ever written in a couple hours.