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60 lines
3.6 KiB
Plaintext
60 lines
3.6 KiB
Plaintext
COMPUTERWORLD 1 April
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CREATORS ADMIT UNIX, C HOAX
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In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken
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Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix
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operating system and C programming language created by them is an
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elaborate April Fools prank kept alive for over 20 years. Speaking at
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the recent UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson revealed the
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following:
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"In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work with the
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GE/Honeywell/AT&T Multics project. Brian and I had just started working
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with an early release of Pascal from Professor Nicklaus Wirth's ETH labs
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in Switzerland and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and
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power. Denis had just finished reading 'Bored of the Rings', a
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hilarious National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien 'Lord of the
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Rings' trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics
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environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the operating
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environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as
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complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration
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levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more
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risque allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped
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version of Pascal, called 'A'. When we found others were actually
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trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional
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cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL and finally C. We stopped when
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we got a clean compile on the following syntax:
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for(;P("\n"),R=;P("|"))for(e=C;e=;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);
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To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that
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allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually
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thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science
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progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&T and
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other US corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C! It has
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taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to generate even
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marginally useful applications using this 1960's technological parody,
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but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense) of the
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general Unix and C programmer. In any event, Brian, Dennis and I have
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been working exclusively in Pascal on the Apple Macintosh for the past
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few years and feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion and truly
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bad programming that has resulted from our silly prank so long ago."
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Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including AT&T, Microsoft,
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Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, and DEC have refused comment at this time.
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Borland International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C tools, including
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the popular Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Turbo C++, stated they had
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suspected this for a number of years and would continue to enhance their
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Pascal products and halt further efforts to develop C. An IBM spokesman
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broke into uncontrolled laughter and had to postpone a hastely convened
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news conference concerning the fate of the RS-6000, merely stating 'VM
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will be available Real Soon Now'. In a cryptic statement, Professor
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Wirth of the ETH institute and father of the Pascal, Modula 2 and Oberon
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structured languages, merely stated that P. T. Barnum was correct.
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In a related late-breaking story, usually reliable sources are
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stating that a similar confession may be forthcoming from William Gates
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concerning the MS-DOS and Windows operating environments. And IBM
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spokesmen have begun denying that the Virtual Machine (VM) product is an
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internal prank gone awry.
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