CREATORS ADMIT UNIX, C HOAX
COMPUTERWORLD 1 April
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
Professor Nichlaus Wirth's ETH labs in Switzerland and we were impressed with its elegant
simplicity and power. Denis 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 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 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
has 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 hastely 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 spokesmen have begun denying that the Virtual Machine
(VM)
product is an internal prank gone awry.
