Origin of the name grep

[Steven Bellovin]

I hate to say it, but the ability to post to multiple newsgroups was
a major design goal for the very first version of netnews.  And it was
implemented as links in that version, which antedated A-netnews.  All
of this happened long before there was a Eunice.

So -- I'm sympathetic to the problems of people who are using non-UNIX
operating systems to run netnews.  But it's a bit chutzpahdic to ask
people to forgo using a useful feature of netnews because a very few
sites can't handle it.  If anyone wants to "fix" netnews to run on
Eunice, I'll be glad to discuss alternative implementations.  I'm not
going to do the work, though...

		--Steve Bellovin