The era of cloth diapers or the origin of the name 'Lint'

[henry_flower]

(Steve Johnson is the author of lint & yacc.)

Date: Wed, 04 Jan 2017 19:20:55 -0800
From: Steve Johnson <scj-nwtwud4k+p9bdgjk7y7tuq@public.gmane.org>
Newsgroups: gmane.org.unix-heritage.general
Subject: Re: What sparked lint? [Was: Unix stories]
X-Mailer: Atmail 7.5.3
Message-ID: <730228a04039dc983eaed5f78a3d817ea80e79bd@webmail.yaccman.com>

[...] At the time Lint first appeared, I had two
young children at home.  This was in the era of cloth diapers, and we
were doing a LOT of wash.  One day, as I was cleaning out the lint
trap in our dryer, I realized that the program I was writing was
performing a similar function, and the name was born.  Since then, I
have written a number of Lint-like programs -- I'm proudest of the one
I did when working for the MathWorks.  It was integrated into the
MATLAB editor, and could give nearly instant feedback when you typed
in faulty code.