Subject: RE: Unix
jsaam@mcc-cpa.com
Date: Mon May 06 2002 - 15:22:06 AKDT
LOL !! Geeze.. Either these guys "fooled" a lotta people, or Microsoft is
truly getting desperate to save itself from the growing *nix IT world :)
BTW.. Where is this published?
Jon
-----Original Message-----
From: Grant Stockly [mailto:grant@stockly.com]
Sent: Sunday, May 05, 2002 2:17 PM
To: aklug@aklug.org
Cc: john@stockly.com
Subject: Unix
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.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2a23 : Mon May 06 2002 - 15:17:43 AKDT