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As the article (email) says, it's from a book printed in the 1960s.

Yes, it's an allegory related by Cyril Parkinson, originally in his lectures, and then eventually in his eponymous book. I'm familiar with it.

My question is: why is the subject of this thread "The Original Bike Shed Email", when there were undoubtedly lots of Bike Shed emails prior to October 1999?

Maybe there were, but I haven't found them. Maybe the title should be "The Earliest Bike Shed Email I've Seen". Also, it gives a pretty thorough explanation of the history behind it, something left out by most references I've seen.

Because this was the "Original Bike Shed Email" that gave rise to, oh, http://www.sheddingbikes.com.

I think this was posted more in response to Zed's popularity now than because of Parkinson's idea as demonstrated on the FreeBSD discussion.

Actually, I posted it because somebody linked it earlier today in a comment and it was the best (and earliest) explanation of the Bike Shed phenomena (in a software context) I'd seen.

Gotcha. I must have been influenced after having just read the "why I booted python from Mongrel2" article. :)

I could have sworn that was the submission where I found the comment, but I couldn't find it again for my reply, so who knows?

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