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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 it's 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)*962))P("|"+(*u/4)*962); 

              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 then
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. ----