Early BSD had a few different random reference files, which seem to have been added around 1990 by Keith Bostic (who is still active, working at MongoDB). There was the airports file, but also the dictionary, a directory of many academic papers on Unix, birth tokens (stones), flowers, the Fortune database, a list of US zip codes, and world country/area telephone codes. I suppose this made a lot more sense when downloading these things from the Internet might be very slow, expensive, or impossible.
At least my MacOS installation has a few of these files still in /usr/share/misc, but not all of them. Apparently in 2003 it did have airports.
That’s hilarious, but what in the world is this for?
…Also,
I need to use OpenBSD more.
Early BSD had a few different random reference files, which seem to have been added around 1990 by Keith Bostic (who is still active, working at MongoDB). There was the airports file, but also the dictionary, a directory of many academic papers on Unix, birth tokens (stones), flowers, the Fortune database, a list of US zip codes, and world country/area telephone codes. I suppose this made a lot more sense when downloading these things from the Internet might be very slow, expensive, or impossible.
At least my MacOS installation has a few of these files still in /usr/share/misc, but not all of them. Apparently in 2003 it did have airports.
The dictionary /usr/share/dict is still popular!