Posted on 12/26/2001 11:20:44 AM PST by capt. norm
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)
Returns a character pointer, I meant. Ok, I am mildy idiotic, ok?
That and the fact that they were using an Apple computer, which won't even interface with an ordinary human PC, nevermind alien technology...
:-)
Would return the address of text constant "_" (assuming that's what P() returns (a dangerous proposal) offset by whatever 'u' / 8 mod 2 would produce. Like i said, nonsense.
I first read this in 1994. It's still just as funny.
I remember a time back in college when I was working with Turbo C++. I would usually give my filenames, um interesting/creative names usually based upon how big of a pain in the @ss the program was to code.
All was well until one day I printed off a program to hand in. A few days later the program was returned with an A and a strange circle at the top of the paper. I looked and saw the circle enclosed the name 'upyours.cpp' I realized I had forgot to disable Header/Page Number option. I had managed to include the name of the file on the top of each page of the code.
Good thing the instructor had a sense of humor!
Well, not in the apparently-singular form, but append an "s" and it's inevitable after a beer.
whereis biff? crypt at source. biff cut yacc tail, yacc cut biff finger."awk!," sed biff. "ar, ar!" sed yacc.
ksh, bash! man cut head, kill yacc at last, make strings.
exit crypt, find mail from su. od. "date? yes."
bif find su nice. make time, date. find su at wall. tee, talk.
ed: "tip: find jobs, biff."
"yes, make tar," sed biff.
su, biff date more: touch, strip, sleep.
"su, inetd perl," sed biff.
"yes!" sed su.
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