Subject: Unix
From: Grant Stockly (grant@stockly.com)
Date: Sun May 05 2002 - 14:16:44 AKDT
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken
Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix
operating system and C programming language created by them is an
elaborate April Fools prank kept alive for over 20 years. Speaking at
the recent UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson revealed the
following:
In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work with the GE/AT&T Multics
project. Brian and I had just started working with an early release
of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth's ETH labs in Switzerland and
we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and power. Dennis had
just finished reading Bored of the Rings, a hilarious National Lampoon
parody of the great Tolkien Lord of the Rings trilogy. As a lark, we
decided to do parodies of the Multics environment and Pascal. Dennis
and I were responsible for the operating environment. We looked at
Multics and designed the new system to be as complex and cryptic as
possible to maximize casual users' frustration levels, calling it Unix
as a parody of Multics, as well as other more risque allusions.
Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal,
called "A." When we found others were actually trying to create real
programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and
evolved into B, BCPL and finally C. We stopped when we got a clean
compile on the following syntax:
for(;P("\n"),R=;P("|"))for(e=C;e=P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("|"+(*u/4)%2);
To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that
allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually
thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science
progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&T and
other US corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C! It has
taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to generate even
marginally useful applications using this 1960's technological parody,
but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense) of the
general Unix and C programmer.
In any event, Brian, Dennis and I have been working exclusively in
Pascal on the Apple Macintosh for the past few years and feel really
guilty about the chaos, confusion and truly bad programming that has
resulted from our silly prank so long ago.
Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including AT&T, Microsoft,
Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, and DEC have refused comment at this time.
Borland International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C tools,
including the popular Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Turbo C++, stated they
had suspected this for a number of years and would continue to enhance
their Pascal products and halt further efforts to develop C. An IBM
spokesman broke into uncontrolled laughter and had to postpone a
hastely convened news conference concerning the fate of the RS-6000,
merely stating "VM will be available Real Soon Now." In a cryptic
statement, Professor Wirth of the ETH institute and father of the
Pascal, Modula 2 and Oberon structured languages, merely stated that
P. T. Barnum was correct.
---------
To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org>
with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a23 : Mon May 06 2002 - 15:09:53 AKDT