CREATORS ADMIT UNIX, C HOAX!
In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken
Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix
operating system and C programming language created by them is an
elaborate April Fools prank kept alive for over 20 years. Speaking at
the recent UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson revealed the
following:
"In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work with
the GE/Honeywell/AT&T Multics project. Brian and I
had just started working with an early release of
Pascal from Nichlaus Wirth's ETH labs in Switzerland
and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity
and power. Dennis had just finished reading 'Bored
of the Rings', a hilarious parody of the great Tolkien
'Lord of the Rings' trilogy. As a lark, we decided
to do parodies of the Multics environment and Pascal.
Dennis and I were responsible for the operating
environment. We looked at Multics and designed the
new system to be as complex and cryptic as possible
to maximize casual users' frustration levels, calling
it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other
risque allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on
the truly warped version of Pascal, called 'A'. When
we found others were actually trying to create real
programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic
features and evolved into B, BCPL, and finally C. We
stopped when we got a clean compile on the following
syntax:
for(;P("\n"), R-;P("|"))for(e=C;e-;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("|"+(*u/4)%2)
To think that modern programmers would try to use a
language that allowed such a statement was beyond our
comprehension! We actually thought of selling this to
the Soviets to set their computer science progress
back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&T;
and other US corporations actually began trying to use
Unix and C! It has taken them 20 years to develop
enough expertise to generate even marginally useful
applications using this 1960's technology parody, but
we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common
sense) of the general Unix and C programmer. In any
event, Brian, Dennis and I have been working
exclusively in Pascal on the Apple Macintosh for the
past few years and feel really guilty about the chaos,
confusion and truly bad programming that have resulted
from our silly prank so long ago."
Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including AT&T, Microsoft,
Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, and DEC have refused to comment at this time.
Borland International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C tools, including
the popular Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Turbo C++, stated they had suspected
this for a number of years and would continue to enhance their Pascal
products and halt further efforts to develop C. An IBM spokesman broke
into uncontrolled laughter and had to postpone a hastily convened news
conference concerning the fate of the RS-6000, merely stating 'VM will be
available Real Soon Now'. In a cryptic statement, Professor Wirth of the
ETH institute and father of the Pascal, Modual 2 and Oberon structures
languages, merely stated that P.T. Barnum was correct.
In a related late-breaking story, usually reliable sources are
stating that a similar confession will be forthcoming from William Gates
concerning the MS-DOS and Windows operating environments. And IBM
spokesmen have begun denying that the Virtual Machine (VM) product is an
internal prank gone awry.
© acknowledged. COMPUTERWORLD 27 March, From the Internet.