Roberts called his program RD, for “read.” Everyone on the ARPANET loved it, and almost everyone came up with variations to RD—a tweak here and a pinch there. A cascade of new mail-handling programs based on the Tenex operating system flowed into the network: NRD, WRD, BANANARD (“banana” was programmer’s slang for “cool” or “hip”), HG, MAILSYS, XMAIL . . . and they kept coming. Pretty soon, the network’s main operators were beginning to sweat. They were like jugglers who had thrown too much up in the air. They needed more uniformity in these programs. Wasn’t anyone paying attention to the
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