what does "UNIX" really stand for?

Steve DeJarnett steve at polyslo.CalPoly.EDU
Wed Sep 28 10:32:54 AEST 1988


In article <1681 at daisy.UUCP> klee at daisy.UUCP (Ken Lee) writes:
>There's an article in this week's "MIS Week" that claims that the name
>"UNIX" was invented by Brian Kernighan in the mid-1960'.  He, along
>with Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, were once part of the MIT Multics
>project, but now part of the Bell Labs computer science lab.  Ritchie
>and Thompson were developing a simpler, more elegant operating system.
>Kernighan called it "castrated Multics", thus UNIX.  

	According to Tannenbaum in his Operating Systems book, Unix(tm)
was derived from UNICS, which stood for "UNiplexed Information and Computing
Service", whereas MULTICS stood for "MULTiplexed Information and Computing
Service".  Kernighan supposedly coined the UNICS term, which was later
converted to UNIX(tm).

	They did work on MULTICS (at least, Thompson did), and when he 
found a PDP-7 lying around, he set out to make a single-user MULTICS.
This evolved (eventually) into Version 6, and so on from there.

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