Creators Admit Unix and C++ a Hoax

Some computer guys with too much free time (Humor) | 1996 | J.M.O.

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CREATORS ADMIT UNIX, C HOAX

UNIXWORLDWEEKLY 4/1 p.1

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 (Bell Labs) 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 Harvard Lampoon parody of the great Tolkein 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 create real programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL and finally C, becoming the first programming language named after a Sesame Street character.

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.

magine 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 Object 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, Bull (formerly Honewell), 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, stating 'a stable 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 spokesmen have begun denying once again that the Virtual Machine (VM) product is an internal prank gone awry.

Comments

(copyright jmo 1991/1996)

[annalex]

It didn't do anything because I didn't define P, which is as intended.

[SteveH]

In yet another late-breaking development, U.S. Democrat Senators Diane Feinstein, Charles Schumer, and moderate Republican Senator John McCain released a joint statement calling for bipartisan support of their anti-terrorist "computer show loophole closure" bill, calling on Congress and the President to abandon right-wing Republican party reservations towards "bringing to an end the terrible costs to society of certain extremist elements" from using the Internet to spread "hate communication" across state and international boundaries and arranging for unregulated sales of illegal subroutines, military munitions-grade algorithms and NIC cards" with attached "crypto" coprocessors that have already been determined to be "contrary to the interests of the WTO and United Nations".

"It is obvious that these people harbor dangerous, terrorist tendencies and will require an expansion of funding into existing and new federal agencies to monitor and help combat the burgeoning problems of renegade computation and communication," a spokesperson for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said in a separate release in support of the new bill. The bill would make felonies trafficing of "late evening special" computer related products without a license, an "instant check" and a three day waiting period for transactions.

Attempts to reach representatives for the so-called "free software" lobby, GNU, for comment and objections by press time were unsuccessful.

[tophat9000]

You know in the movie "Independence Day" there was always the question how they could come up with a computer virus that would interface with and unknown alien operating system.

I always thought the answer was that Unix was the aliens operating system and had been revered engineer from the captured alien ship in the late fifty's.

I mean come on you don't think "grep" is a human command do you?

[Yeti]

P.T. Barnum? Correct about what?

I think it might have been him who said(and I paraphrase)"Nobody ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

Or maybe that was someone else.

[Dakmar]

I had to replace R- with R-- and e- with e--, otherwise it won't compile.

I was looking at it and noticed that. I thought maybe it some weird unary operator I wasn't familiar with.

[SteveH]

Actually, it was created by Bell Labs as a prop for the film, "The President's Analyst." When they found out that the film did not present the phone company in a particularly favorable light, ...

No, not at all; it is yet another rumor that "The President's Analyst" is based on fiction. It is actually a suppressed *documentary* and James Coburn's "acting" career is merely a transparent cover.

yacc SYNACK rpc IDL OC3 SSL UDP MBUF_EXTERNAL awk joy Green Dragon XXX ATM AFS singleton Mach RAID5 Xinu Torvalds b_read() SCSI webserver spider GNU Red Hat PGP pageout() multilevel hash key UltraSparc daemon pagein() kevent pathname perl DSL Merced SMP 4.4BSD-Lite execve() fgrep egrep vnode vfork() PTE System V Alpha CISC sockbuf IPC bus error kill 9 Plan 9 blue box Murray Hill process migration keepalive fsck fsdb pthreads LFS Veritas interleaved dup() IMP Cisco Kerberos rc.local PCI X-Windows gdb fair share scheduler process 0 nfsd diskless RIP Shift-JIS ANSI C bash core dump Tenex kdb rdb panic()

[strela]

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);

If somebody held a gun to my head and forced me to choose which I hated worse; Osama bin Laden or REGEXP, my brains would probably be blown all over the nearest wall.

[mommybain]

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);

Yeah, so it compiles...what happens wheh it's executed?

[SteveH]

I was just getting ready to reply to you when I got a message from windows saying an application caused an "illegal operation". Should I turn myself in or is the "illegal operation" part of the conspiracy? disclaimer: I haven't, to my knowledge, done anything illegal, immoral, illicit or ill-advised.

I regret to inform you that this implies that your name has already been run-time linked to a potential cyberterrorist organization. Have you by any chance donated software recently to the Boy Scouts of America, Red Cross or The Salvation Army? Or signed an online petition supporting the recall of Sen. John McCain or the investigation into PardonGate? Are you now or have you ever been a member of the organization called "Infinite Freep", or have you ever participated in an anti-Hillary! demonstration without a CLL (concealed laptop license)?

It doesn't really matter, you realize, since your name on that doubly linked list implies that you are doubly guilty according to ex post facto provisions of bills certain to be passed by Congress in the next turnover if not before. Your best bet is to turn yourself in to the nearest local Hillary! 2004 Exploratory Committee office, unless you reside in Florida, in which case you need to report to the Reno for Governor organization and do [TBD] hours of community service to avoid guaranteed future deportation and/or prosecution and incarceration in Club Fed.

Alternatively, you can also serve the online community by working [TBD] hours in the Windows/XP first level support desk (this option is particularly popular among those who are computer illiterate).

Sorry dude, it could happen to anyone :-( ...

[Centurion2000]

bringing to an end the terrible costs to society of certain extremist elements" from using the Internet to spread "hate communication" across state and international boundaries and arranging for unregulated sales of illegal subroutines, military munitions-grade algorithms and NIC cards" with attached "crypto" coprocessors that have already been determined to be "contrary to the interests of the WTO and United Nations

Lovely, and in 20 years this probably wont be a joke.

[j_tull]

I can't belive you sed(1) that.

[jammer]

Post 7: lol. Hilarious.

[JRandomFreeper]

I had to replace R- with R-- and e- with e--,

I think the n- usage is a deprecated non-ANSI (LOL) usage. Back before C++ was standardized (snort) and programs could be ported to different machines with little difficulty (guffaw! LOLOLOL!)

I tried to say it with a straight face.

/john

[Dakmar]

All I know is that (e-) is nonsense. P(...) is a function not defined in this article, so P(string constant+address of constant variable) is un-defined.

[_Jim]

Yeah, so it compiles...what happens wheh it's executed?

... well, ahhh ... that depends on what libraries it's linked with ...

[Dakmar]

Also depends on what P() does, don't it?

[rundy]

Re-read your comments and then sit down and consider whether or not all of the time you spend trying to master Unix and C have affected you in any way.

Ha, Ha, Ha :-{

[Dakmar]

Let me clarify - P( char * ) returns, don't it?

Ok, it could be p( (void) * )

[_Jim]

Well ... duh ...