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- Path: sparky!uunet!psgrain!ee.und.ac.za!csir.co.za!olsa99!infow02!andrewr
- From: andrewr@infoware.co.za (Andrew Roos)
- Newsgroups: comp.unix.misc
- Subject: Re: UNIX: Acronym?
- Message-ID: <1992Dec15.091834.1112@infoware.co.za>
- Date: 15 Dec 92 09:18:34 GMT
- References: <1992Dec4.104915.7303@gmd.de> <1992Dec4.193328.7888@cdf.toronto.edu>
- Organization: Infoware (Pty) Ltd
- Lines: 26
-
- a1001032@cdf.toronto.edu (Fiona Wong) writes:
-
- >In article <1992Dec4.104915.7303@gmd.de> thomas@gmd.de writes:
- >>I just read in a non-technical magazine that UNIX is an acronym for
- >>"Universal Network Interactive Exchange" operating system. Hmmm. That's
- > ^ ^ ^ ^
-
- >Then, why not use UNIE instead of UNIX?? :-)
-
-
- >>a new one on me. Does anyone know where the author may have gotten this idea?
- >>Is there any truth in it?
- >>
- >>
- >>---
-
- This sounds to me like an attempt to put words to an acronym, not vice-versa.
- as I understand it, UNIX is a contraction of UNICS which was a play on MULTICS,
- the operating system which Ritchie and Thompson were working on together before
- Unix. MULTICS stood for something like "Multiplexed Timesharing Control System"
- and was an attempt at an interactive multi-user OS which failed because the
- project was too large, time dragged on and the backers pulled out. Ritchie and
- Thompson decided to write their own operating system for a "spare" PDP-8 which
- was lying around at Bell labs. Since they were incorporating some of the
- concepts they had been working on for the Multics project, they called it
- "UNICS". This was later shortened to "Unix".
-