Well, I'm at work so I can't dig around my library but it was easy enough using date range restrictions to find an academic example in Google that dates back to

Well, I'm at work so I can't dig around my library but it was easy enough using date range restrictions to find an academic example in Google that dates back to '99: http://cslibrary.stanford.edu/105/LinkedListProblems.pdf http://cslibrary.stanford.edu/105/LinkedListProblems.pdf . (It was actually the first hit.) Searching further backwards in time is left as an exercise to the reader. Multi-level pointer dereferencing is a fundamental C / assembly language skill and Linus' example was just about the most basic example there is.