🚀 go-pugleaf

  [ lhom@OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Louis Hom) writes:
  [
    [[ In article <39dsid$d0i@lyra.csx.cam.ac.uk>,
    [[ J.T. Foote <jtf@dante.eng.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
    [[
      [[[ John Woods writes:
      [[[
      [[[ I think you'll find that one of the researchers was `Bernstein' ---
      [[[ German for Firestone or amber. The ochre was named as a joke to
      [[[ follow on.  Bit like Southern and Western blots.
    [[
    [[ Similar to how UNIX was named as a "pun" on MULTICS?
  [
  [ whoa.  What's this UNIX joke?  I've only heard that "Pine Is Not Elm".
  [ _________________________________________________________________________
  [ Lou Hom
  [ hom@ocf.berkeley.edu

In the late 60's Bell Labs used "Multics," an advanced system written by
MIT for *multi-user* "time-sharing" computers. UNIX was developed to fill
a need for a dedicated *single-user* system.

The "UNIX" name came from the *single-user* focus (uni) of the system as
opposed to the *multiuser* orientation of Multics:

    _Understanding_UNIX_a_Conceptual_Guide_, 2nd Edition,
    by James R. Groff and Paul N. Weinberg,
    Published by QUE Corporation, ISBN: 0-88022-343-X

    Chapter 2, "A UNIX Perspective," pp 15-16.

    "The history of UNIX began in the late 1960s with a programmer named
     Ken Thompson, working at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey. 
     Thompson and others in the Computing Science Research Group were
     using an early "time-sharing" computer, the General Electric  
     GE 645(tm). The GE 645 ran an advanced, interactive operating system
     called Multics, which had been developed by MIT.  Though the Multics
     system was powerful, it also was expensive to use, especially for one
     of Thompson's programs named Space travel.

    "Thompson decided to move the Space Travel program to a dedicated
     computer system, a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-7(tm).  This
     system offered a good hardware environment for running Space Travel,
     but the computer lacked the kind of software support needed to
     develop programs like Thompson's.  UNIX, then was born out of
     necessity as a set of software routines to support use of the PDP-7. 
     This first version of the UNIX system, completely writtn in PDP-7
     assembly language, was completed in 1969. 

    "The origin of the name "UNIX" carries its own irony.  The name 
     came from Multics, with the *multiuser* orientation of that name 
     changed to *uni* to reflect the single-user focus of UNIX.  
     Multiuser versions of UNIX were to come much later, after it had 
     been completely re-written and transported to different hardware.  
     The single-user version of UNIX became operational in 1971 and 
     apparently caught on well within Bell Labs."

Stan 

     *========= Stan Greene ================== Sorcerer@NetCom.com =*
     | All opinions are solely my own. | or: StanGreene@Delphi.com  |
     | But, they should be yours, too. | or:  FlarePistols@10paces  |
     *==============================================================*