Kernighan supplies some crucial context — in the form of a story. Their colleague Lee McMahon had wanted to study the Federalist papers, which were written by several different authors (including Alexander Hamilton) but published under the same pseudonym, carefully analyzing the text for clues about their original authors by finding all the occurrences of specific words and phrases. Unfortunately, a plaintext version of the collection was one megabyte — “down in the noise by today’s standard,” but at the ti
Source: Brian Kernighan Remembers the Origins of ‘grep’ – The New Stack