T h e   V O G O N   N e w s   S e r v i c e

VNS TECHNOLOGY WATCH:                     [Mike Taylor, VNS Correspondent]
=====================                                 [Littleton, MA, USA]

COMPUTERWORLD 1 April

                 CREATORS ADMIT UNIX, 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 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 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.

{COMPUTERWORLD 1 April}
{contributed by Bernard L. Hayes}

<><><><><><><>   VNS Edition : 2336     Tuesday  4-Jun-1991    <><><><><><><>