Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!apple!bionet!agate!pasteur!ames!elroy!cit-vax!oberon!sm.unisys.com!csun!polyslo!steve From: steve@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Steve DeJarnett) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,ca.unix Subject: Re: what does "UNIX" really stand for? Message-ID: <4191@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU> Date: 28 Sep 88 00:32:54 GMT References: <1681@daisy.UUCP> Reply-To: steve@polyslo.UUCP (Steve DeJarnett) Organization: Lab Rat Rumpus Room -- Cal Poly SLO Lines: 24 In article <1681@daisy.UUCP> klee@daisy.UUCP (Ken Lee) writes: >There's an article in this week's "MIS Week" that claims that the name >"UNIX" was invented by Brian Kernighan in the mid-1960'. He, along >with Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, were once part of the MIT Multics >project, but now part of the Bell Labs computer science lab. Ritchie >and Thompson were developing a simpler, more elegant operating system. >Kernighan called it "castrated Multics", thus UNIX. According to Tannenbaum in his Operating Systems book, Unix(tm) was derived from UNICS, which stood for "UNiplexed Information and Computing Service", whereas MULTICS stood for "MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service". Kernighan supposedly coined the UNICS term, which was later converted to UNIX(tm). They did work on MULTICS (at least, Thompson did), and when he found a PDP-7 lying around, he set out to make a single-user MULTICS. This evolved (eventually) into Version 6, and so on from there. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Steve DeJarnett | Smart Mailers -> steve@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU | | Computer Systems Lab | Dumb Mailers -> ..!ucbvax!voder!polyslo!steve | | Cal Poly State Univ. |------------------------------------------------| | San Luis Obispo, CA 93407 | BITNET = Because Idiots Type NETwork | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------