Thompson, Ritchie and Kernighan admit that Unix was a prank (1989)

57 points by imran3740 5 years ago | 15 comments

I'll always remember a backhanded remark Mary Shaw (https://www.isri.cmu.edu/people/core-faculty/shaw-mary.html) made about AT&T Bell Labs at a talk she gave about Computer Architecture as the "New Jersey School of Computation."

User23 5 years ago |

This looks like a good place to link the Unix Hater’s Handbook[1]

djsumdog 5 years ago | |

360 pages?!

gowld 5 years ago | | |

It's Volume 1.

variaga 5 years ago |

The copyright on the page says 2013, but I think this was actually written in 1989 ("20 years ago", "1969")

aaron695 5 years ago | |

1991

Not sure if it was joking about being from computerworld?

It's not in this edition -

Conspiracy -- Linus started Linux as an April fools joke from this April fools joke.

"This has been brewing since april 1991"

dang 5 years ago | |

Edit: hmm. They say over 20 years. That probably means later than 1989 but not 1999.

variaga 5 years ago | |

also really classy to put their own copyright notice on a document "found on usenet and the author could not be determined"

djsumdog 5 years ago | | |

probably just a standard footer that wraps everything

java-man 5 years ago |

"At one time, we joked about selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science progress back 20 or more years."

Hilarious. Ended up selling it to everybody.

But seriously, given the long history of failures (i.e. search CVE database for buffer overflow), this joke does read like a true story.

ThePowerOfFuet 5 years ago |

> This piece was found on Usenet. This is fiction, not reality. Always remember that this is not true. It's really a joke, right? -- Editor

djsumdog 5 years ago | |

Nah, I refuse to believe it. Death to the author. Poe's Law and all that.

dylan604 5 years ago |

"Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don’t think that is a coincidence."

Nice. Does this mean to be a successful Unix Admin you also need to be an accomplished psychonaut?

dennis_jeeves 5 years ago |

>Dennis Ritchie said: "What really tore it (just when ADA was catching on), was that Bjarne Stroustrup caught onto our joke

Lol.