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Home > Archive > Linux/Unix > March 2002 > UNIX acronym??
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| mcorpuz 2002-03-20, 12:03 pm |
| Does anyone know what UNIX stands for, if anything? Is it an Acronym?? | |
| The VMS Kid 2002-03-20, 12:28 pm |
| It was a "weak pun on MULTICS", the operating system that UNIX was descended from. Ken Thompson said this, so it must be true. | |
| Supertech 2002-03-20, 2:00 pm |
| http://www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/
As Ritchie summed up the effort, "Although it was not until well into 1970 that Brian Kernighan suggested the name 'UNIX,' in a somewhat treacherous pun on 'Multics,' the operating system we know today was born." | |
| The VMS Kid 2002-03-20, 2:23 pm |
| MULTICS: An early time-sharing operating system co-designed by a consortium including MIT, GE, and Bell Laboratories as a successor to CTSS. The design was first presented in 1965, planned for operation in 1967, first operational in 1969, and took several more years to achieve respectable performance and stability.
Multics was very innovative for its time -- among other things, it provided a hierarchical file system with access control on individual files and introduced the idea of treating all devices uniformly as special files. It was also the first OS to run on a symmetric multiprocessor, and the only general-purpose system to be awarded a B2 security rating by the NSA (see Orange Book).
Bell Labs left the development effort in 1969 after judging that second-system effect had bloated Multics to the point of practical unusability. Honeywell commercialized Multics in 1972 after buying out GE's computer group, but it was never very successful: at its peak in the 1980s, there were between 75 and 100 Multics sites, each a multi-million dollar mainframe.
One of the former Multics developers from Bell Labs was Ken Thompson, and Unix deliberately carried through and extended many of Multics' design ideas; indeed, Thompson described the very name `Unix' as `a weak pun on Multics'. For this and other reasons, aspects of the Multics design remain a topic of occasional debate among hackers. |
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