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unix.txt
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1997-04-16
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Subject: CREATORS ADMIT UNIX, C HOAX
CREATORS ADMIT UNIX, C HOAX
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/Honeywell/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 have 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 hastily 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.
In a related late-breaking story, usually reliable sources are
stating that a similar confession may be forthcoming from William Gates
concerning the MS-DOS and Windows operating environments. And IBM
spokesmen have begun denying that the Virtual Machine (VM) product is an
internal prank gone awry.