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Date:      Thu, 3 May 2001 01:38:36 -0500
From:      Andrew Hesford <ajh3@chmod.ath.cx>
To:        Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>
Cc:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: What is BSD
Message-ID:  <20010503013836.A949@cec.wustl.edu>
In-Reply-To: <15088.60767.89794.219758@guru.mired.org>; from mwm@mired.org on Thu, May 03, 2001 at 12:32:15AM -0500
References:  <124992994@toto.iv> <15088.59902.80071.263738@guru.mired.org> <20010503002403.A798@cec.wustl.edu> <15088.60767.89794.219758@guru.mired.org>

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On Thu, May 03, 2001 at 12:32:15AM -0500, Mike Meyer wrote:
> Andrew Hesford <ajh3@chmod.ath.cx> types:
> > On Thu, May 03, 2001 at 12:17:50AM -0500, Mike Meyer wrote:
> > > Andrew Hesford <ajh3@chmod.ath.cx> types:
> > > > Back in the days when I was, oh, about -13 years old (yes, that's a
> > > > minus sign), a man named Dennis Ritchie and some of his cohorts at Bell
> > > > Labs decided to build an operating system to run on their PDP-11
> > > Um - that was a PDP-7, and it was never known as "Unics", but was Unix
> > > from the first, though that was indeed a pun on Multics. They didn't
> > > write a PDP-11 version of Unix until after the PDP-11 was available.
> > I wasn't sure about either of those... but the UNIX timeline, available
> > at the URL I posted before, shows UNIX coming from UNICS. This was
> > September 1969. The first UNIX release is listed as November 3, 1971.
> > 
> > The site has a fair amount of information, including links to the home
> > pages of Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson and others. Here
> > is the URL again: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/levenez/unix/. I urge you all
> > to check it out.
> 
> That also includes the AT&T paper on the history of Unix, which I used
> to verify the original machine type. It happened to mentioned the
> origin of the name.

I was only wrong in one place then, the original machine. From
http://www.unix-systems.org/what_is_unix/history_timeline.html:

	The result was a system which a punning colleague called UNICS
	(UNiplexed Information and Computing Service)--an 'emasculated
	Multics'; no one recalls whose idea the change to UNIX was

-- 
Andrew Hesford
ajh3@chmod.ath.cx

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