THE JOKE'S ON YOU -- CREATORS ADMIT UNIX, C IS A HOAX
 Unix, C a 20 year long elaborate April Fools prank   
 
 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 Fool's
 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/Honeywell/AT&T
 Multics project. Brian and I had just started working with an early release
 of Pascal from Professor Niklaus Wirth's ETH labs in Switzerland and we
 were impressed with it's elegant simplicity and power. Dennis had just
 finished reading 'Bored of the Rings' a hilarious parody of Tolkien's
 'Lord of The Rings' triology. 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 simple and cryptic as possible to maximize casual user 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 program
 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 have resulted from
 our silly prank so long ago."
 
 (Ed. note: Do these guys have a strange sense of humor, or what?)
 
 Major Unix, C vendors and customers, including AT&T, Microsoft, Hewlett-
 Packard, GTE, NCR, and DEC have refused comment at this time. Borland
 Internation, a leading vendor in Pascal and C tools, stated they had
 suspected this for a number of years and would continue to enhacne their
 Pascal products and halt further efforts to develop C. An IBM spokesman
 broke into uncontrolled laughter and had to postpone a hastily convened
 
 (Ed. Note: When we last left our merry jokers, the companies that had been
  dutifully using C were not commenting. Borland said they will halt any 
  further production of C products. The IBM rep was about to say.....)
 
  ...."VM would be available Real Soon Now". In a cryptic statement, 
 Professor Wirth of the ETH Insititute and father of the Pascal, Modula 2
 and Oberon structured languages, merely stated that P.T. Barnum was correct.
 
 In a relate story, a similar confession from Will Gates concerning the
 MS-DOS and Windows environment may be forthcoming, and IBM spokesmen have
 begun denying that the Virtual Memory (VM) product is an internal prank
 gone awry.
 
 Taken from RISKS 11.79
 Posted by Jim Horning <horning@Pa.dec.com>
 Written by Mike Taylor at The Vogon News Service