what does "UNIX" really stand for? (also Plan 9)

Bob Toxen bob at cloud9.UUCP
Sat Oct 22 14:13:25 AEST 1988


> The way I heard it was as follows.  ... "You: nix!", ...
Sorry, no.  UNIX is a play on names of Multics.  The latter was supposed
to be all things to all people with every feature including the
kitchen sink.  The modern counterpart is Ada.

Ken conceived of UNIX as one thing to one person and its simple elegence,
high performance, easier programming has made it much less popular than
DOS which has uh, um, ahh...
> I was in the village this evening (that's Grenwich Village for you
> non New Yorkers)
That's Village with a capital-V to New Yorkers who know that proper names
should be capitalized.  (It's not spelling I'm complaining about.)

> Roy Smith, System Administrator
> Public Health Research Institute
> {allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers}!phri!roy -or- phri!roy at uunet.uu.net
-- 

Bob Toxen	{ucbvax!ihnp4,harvard,cloud9!es}!anvil!cavu!bob
Stratus Computer, Marlboro, MA



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