First version of Parallel recovered

[Ole Tange]

Last summer I dug out a 16 years old backup disk:

https://www.version2.dk/blog/dekryptering-16-aar-gammel-harddisk-1090958
(Danish)

Today I went through some of the data. And imagine my delight when I
found an old version of Parallel (way before it was called GNU). It is
dated 2002-01-06.

Here is the full(!) source code:

  #!/usr/bin/perl

 $processes=shift;

 chomp(@jobs=<>);
 for (@jobs) {
     $jobnr++;
     push @makefile,
     (".PHONY : job$jobnr\n",
      "job$jobnr :\n",
      "\t$_\n");
 }
 unshift @makefile, "all : ",(map { "job$_ " } 1 .. $jobnr),"\n";

 open (MAKE, "| make -k -f - -j $processes") || die;
 print MAKE @makefile;
 close MAKE;

It even works with no changes:

  (echo "sleep 2; echo a"; echo "sleep 1; echo b") | parallel 2

The emacs backup file (parallel~ also dated 2002-01-06) contains:

  #!/bin/sh

  cat > /tmp/$$ <<EOF
  all:
     ls
  EOF

  make -f /tmp/$$ -j 3

which clearly is a test of making a Makefile on the fly, but which is
not a working version of Parallel. So I am convinced the above
actually *is* the very first version of Parallel.

Since COVID ruined the 10 year anniversary of Parallel becoming GNU
Parallel, maybe we should celebrate the 20 year anniversary of
Parallel next year?


/Ole