I'm going to hate myself

[Andy Tanenbaum]

In article <20347 at beta.lanl.gov> hwe at 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 at cs.vu.nl)
-- 
Andy Tanenbaum (ast at cs.vu.nl)