Xref: utzoo comp.os.minix:2975 comp.unix.wizards:9553 Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!agate!ig!uwmcsd1!marque!uunet!mcvax!botter!star.cs.vu.nl!ast From: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix,comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: I'm going to hate myself Keywords: Trademarks Message-ID: <812@ast.cs.vu.nl> Date: 21 Jun 88 21:43:46 GMT References: <20347@beta.lanl.gov> Reply-To: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) Organization: VU Informatica, Amsterdam Lines: 26 In article <20347@beta.lanl.gov> hwe@beta.lanl.gov (Skip Egdorf) writes: >MINIX is a trademark of Digital Systems House Interesting, interesting. Here comes one of those stories that only insiders know. The derivation of UNIX is as follows. Ken Thompson was one of the programmers on MULTICS, the MULTIplexed Information and Computing Service projected started by MIT, Bell Labs and GE. After Bell Labs pulled out, Ken found an unused PDP-7 and tried writing MULTICS on his one. Brian Kernighan noted that it only supported 1 user, so it should be called Unics (Uni being the Latin for 1). The spelling got garbled later. My original name for this system was MONICS (the MONoplexed Information and Computing Service, Mono being Greek for 1). The spelling later got garbled to MONIX. All my students knew it under this name. Then Prentice-Hall did a trademark search and discovered that MONIX was the trademark of some French company. Bye MONIX. I then suggested MINIX, STUNIX, and various other names. Then did trademark searches on them and MINIX was not anybody's trademark, so we picked it. I can't explain the Digital Systems House alleged trademark except to say they must not have done a very good job of trademarking it since it didn't show up in a very specific search for it. Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl) -- Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)