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Creators Admit UNIX, C Hoax
COMPUTERWORLD 1 April
CREATORS ADMIT UNIX, C HOAX
In an announcment 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 Professor 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 National Lampoon 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 more risque
allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal,
called 'A'. When we found others were actually trying to creat 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 technological
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 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,
Modula 2 and Oberon structured languages, merely stated that P. T. Barnum was
correct.
In a related late-breaking story, usually reliable sources are stating that a
similar confession may be forthcoming from William Gates concerning the MS-DOS
and Windows operating environments. And IBM spokesman have begun denying that
the Virtual Machine (VM) product is an internal prank gone awry.
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