First, my apologies if this message looks awful.
The pun might have stemmed from another variant. Like
EUNICE.
The original poster was certainly not much aware of
UNIX history, so
it might as well come to him from an also less
knowledgeable user who
got it from a vendor of a EUNI* variant.
>From memory, I seem to remember at least a company
named EUNICE involved
with UNIX, and a UNIX-like environment for the VAX
(under VMS).
So, may be one of these later was actually named with
the 'eunuchs' pun
intended (perhaps as a castrated down UNIX system on
top of VMS)
and the pun circulated among some customers. For a
newcomer buying it,
it would be easy to assimilate *his* variant with
standard UNIX and extend
the pun. We just saw a similar confussion of LINUX
with UNIX from a poster
asking for LINUX v5, 6 o 7.
It makes sense as well to have a similar pun
circulated later, when other
operating systems which were arguably better (and I DO
NOT want to start
that discussion) or more extensive had to deploy
support for POSIX/UNIX
due to market needs.
To me it certainly has no sense having such an
association in a time like
the early 70s when it would have had a much stronger
emotional charge and
at a time when UNIX was still in its early
development.
j
On Mon, 5 Jun 2006 23:41:06 -0400
dmr(a)plan9.bell-labs.com wrote:
> Michael Welle originally asked,
>
> > last week a work mate told us a tale about how
Unix came to its
> > name. He believes that Unix is named after the
term eunuch (a
> > homophone of (to?) unix in english language). One
can see Unix as a
> > castrated successor of Multics.
>
> The pun may have been at the back of Kernighan's
mind,
> but the original explanation was "one of whatever
> Multics was many of." I think the quip about
> "castrated Multics" came from MIT.
>
> Incidentally, I don't think the Unics spelling ever
occurred
> in print, though I could be proved wrong.
>
> Dennis
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Michael Welle originally asked,
> last week a work mate told us a tale about how Unix came to its
> name. He believes that Unix is named after the term eunuch (a
> homophone of (to?) unix in english language). One can see Unix as a
> castrated successor of Multics.
The pun may have been at the back of Kernighan's mind,
but the original explanation was "one of whatever
Multics was many of." I think the quip about
"castrated Multics" came from MIT.
Incidentally, I don't think the Unics spelling ever occurred
in print, though I could be proved wrong.
Dennis
Interesting thread. The Jargon file only says:
[In the authors' words, "A weak pun on Multics"; very early on it was "UNICS"]
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/U/Unix.html
It never occurred to me that the pun might not be recognized, even to
people whose first language is not English. Americans sometimes forget
that not everyone is American.
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "John Cowan" <cowan(a)ccil.org>
> To: "Andrzej Popielewicz" <vasco(a)icpnet.pl>
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs?
> Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2006 11:02:26 -0400
> English has always had an appetite for borrowed words, ever since we
> replaced huge amounts of our native vocabulary with borrowed French,
> Latin, and Greek words.
I would rather say "augmented" than "replaced", and of course one should
not neglect the other languages from which there have been significant
borrowings, such as Hindi, which are not, of course, as extensive as from
the languages you mention.
> (There is, however, just to get *completely* off-topic, the curious
> case of the English word "spruce", which means any of various coniferous
> evergreen trees of the genus _Picea_. Most of this word is unquestionably
> from "Pruce", the older English name for Prussia, now obsolete.
> But Wikipedia suggests, perhaps rightly, that the initial s- comes
> from a misinterpretation of the Polish phrase _z Prus_ 'from Prussia'.
> English dictionaries are not conclusive.)
Well, the definition of Spruce in the OED has several quotations from
the 17th century and before, which seem to indicate that one of the
names for Prussia was in fact "Spruce", which suggests that the
Wikipedia article may not be in fact accurate. The "z Prus" etymology,
without any supporting evidence, is tenuous...
1378 Durh. Acc. Rolls (Surtees) 47 In xxiiij piscibus de sprws empt.,
ijs. 14.. Chaucer's Dethe Blaunche 1025 (MS. Bodl. 638), She wolde
not..send men yn-to Walakye, To Sprewse & yn-to Tartarye. 1521 in
Ellis Orig. Lett. Ser. II. I. 292 The expedition of the Gentlemen
of Spruce. c1550 BALE K. Johan (Camden) 9 In Sycell, in Naples, in
Venys and Ytalye, In Pole, Spruse and Berne. 1639 FULLER Holy War
V. iii. 233 They busied themselves in defending of Christendome,..as
the Teutonick order defended Spruce-land against the Tartarian.
1656 G. ABBOT Descr. World 69 On the east and north corner of Germany
lyeth a country called Prussia, in English Pruthen or Spruce.
Greetings Hellwig
Mine Brooder in Unix Dast ist!
I have noticed something about your v7 creation. When I try to use the C
compiler to compile fp support or any system structures(not structs but
components) I get an error /lib/c0 so there's something wrong with the c0
pass in libc. It was probably that way when the tapes were recovered. I have
managed to compile and assemble all the c source in the /usr/src/cmd/c
directory into object files so the assembler works. What should I do
manually with all these .o files? I need a working compiler.
Bill
I have I V7 system Warren that runs on PDP-11 that was created from some
of Keith Bostics's fileblock fragments. I can get this system up and running
but the C compiler seems to be broke. I get ***error 8 which I don't know
what that means but it's probably a pdp11 error code. I'm still trying to
learn about the pdps but do you know how I might regenerate this C compiler
from v7 that will fix c0? When I try to add floating point number emulation
to the C compiler and regen things I always get an error at c0. How could I
regenerate the c0 pass file? That seems to be the only thing that's stopping
me from going further. I don't know if the compiler can be rebuilt from
scratch if something like lib/c0 is broken.
Bill
OK, so I'm wwwwwaaaaaaayyyyyyy behind on reading TUHS.
I just wanted to say that if you can find a copy of the third edition
of "Unix In A Nutshell" (NOT the current fourth edition) you'll find
a chapter on the MM macros. It should be enough to make use of them,
as I did buy one of the SysIII licenses and I have a copy of this paper
that I referred to when writing that chapter.
And groff did do a good enough job formatting it that I was able
to print it out and it looked reasonable if not perfect. (Of course,
that was circa 1999...)
If I ever Get A Round Tuit I want to take the troff material from that
edition and do it as an ebook for O'Reilly. But I don't know when or
even if that'll ever happen.
Arnold
> Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 15:25:49 +0100
> From: Gunnar Ritter <gunnarr(a)acm.org>
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] papers on the -mm macros?
> To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org, "A. Wik" <aw(a)aw.gs>
>
> "A. Wik" <aw(a)aw.gs> wrote:
>
> > I've found the documentation for most of the major
> > troff preprocessors and macros packages, but I can't
> > seem to find anything but occasional references to a
> > paper on the "Programmer's Memorandum Macros" (troff -mm)
> > by Smith and Mashey.
>
> The source code for this paper had been available as part
> of the System III distribution under the old (unfree) SCO
> license.
>
> In case you had applied for that license, and you still
> have an old PUPS archive CD at hand, you can find it in
> Distributions/usdl/SysIII/sys3.tar.gz.
>
> You will not be able to recover the original layout since
> PostScript font metrics are quite different from CAT ones,
> but Heirloom troff produces readable output at least.
>
> Gunnar
> >But the point being made was that I've been around the block, I've worked
> >on and/or looked hard at many different Unix variants and I'm not at all sad
> >to see them go.
>
> Why are you here then?
Good question. I like it here, I like old Unix. I have little fondness
for all the commercial unices, see http://www.bitmover.com/lm/papers/srcos.html
for my reasons.
I think you may be confusing my dislike for commercial unix with a dislike
for unix. If so, that's mistake because I love Unix. I've dedicated a
huge portion of my life to helping unix as best I can.
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.comhttp://www.bitkeeper.com
On Mon, 22 May 2006, 19:38:21 -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
>But the point being made was that I've been around the block, I've worked
on and/or looked hard at many different Unix variants and I'm not at all sad
to see them go.
Why are you here then?
It's a fact that many of the big-gun Unix vendors have moved on but Unix
development continues to persist, so don't put it down yet. Unix is still
very much alive and kicking. Unix has been around forever and the Unicies
that remain still offer enough diversions to mix up the market and make
things interesting for us all. If Linux was the only Unix like system out
there then what would happen if Linux went belly-up. It could easily
happen if the big Linux vendors Redhat, Suse etc went to the dogs. Having
other Unix systems out their competing with each other as well as Linux is
healthy.
