Windows TP .... nyuk, nyuk

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George Rimel gave this short definition of what Unix is:

> 3) the successor to Multics, written at Bell Labs by Ritchie & Co after
> developing the C language

And Bro Brown wrote:

> Unix is a multi-user operating system...

Ironically, Ritchie and friends named "Unix" as a kind of parody of
(not successor to) Multics.  Multics was multi-user (thus "Multics")
and huge.  Ken Thompson had a spare PDP-7 at Bell Labs and wanted
something small, simple, and elegant.  The new O.S. was designed to be
single-user, thus UNIx.  A play on the name "Multics."

The irony is in the fact that Unix is now seen as a multi-user O.S.
and, in fact, Unix is an outstanding choice in multi-user operating
systems.  In the commercial environments I do work with, it's not
unusual to see hundreds or even thousands of users using the same
machine.  A common requirement for the software I write is for it to
have the ability to service thousands of processes or users at once
with minimal latency.

BTW, the original Unix was written in PDP assembly language :-)  The
rewrite was written in C.  Most major Unixen are still written in C,
and can trace their origins to the Bell Labs System 7 release and/or UC
Berkeley's BSD.  Exceptions include Linux (which was written from
scratch, and which internally bears no resemblance to Unix), Minix (an
academic project), and some other variants.  The NeXTStep kernel was
written in an obscure cousin of C++ called Objective C.

Richard Masoner
richardm@cd.com