Creators admit: UNIX and C Hoax!
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 Niklaus 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 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 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.