I remember a story I heard second hand. The Bell System had so many acronyms that they published yearly a small book with all the acronyms in the Bell System. Somebody (Ken?, Doug?) got a call one year that they wanted to include UNIX in the book, so would we please tell them what UNIX stood for. The reply was that UNIX was not an acronym. So the caller said: "OK. We won't put it in the book..."
----- Original Message -----
From:
"Clem Cole" <clemc@ccc.com>
To:
"Mary Ann Horton" <mah@mhorton.net>
Cc:
<tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent:
Sat, 9 Nov 2019 16:23:04 -0500
Subject:
Re: [TUHS] UNIX or unix
In fact ATT legal had a document they sent to all commercial licensees around 1980 on proper use of the name. I wonder if I still have/can find a copy. But the lawyers were pretty clear. It was UNIX with ™ and later the R with a circle around beside the all caps letters after they registered it.
It was that letter that started all the names like Xenix, Ultrix, HP-UX, SunOS, RTU etc.
I just finished Brian Kernighan's book (excellent!) and he addresses
this in section 7.6. (Yes, he wrote the book in troff.)
He prefers "Unix" and wrote it that way except for this section. He says
"Bell Labs' legal guardians decided that the name Unix was a valuable
trademark that had to be protected..." Legal mostly required it to be
used as an adjective "The UNIX TM operating system", and how the ms
macros produced a small caps "UNIX" (and a footnote on the first
reference). He's clear that the 1127 folks hated the requirements from
legal.
It is true that the file which contains the kernel was /unix, or /vmunix
for Berkeley Unix, but that's the name of the file, not the proper name
of the operating system for English prose. By convention, virtually all
Unix files were in lower case.
Mary Ann
On 11/9/19 12:36 PM, Derrik Walker v2.0 wrote:
> On 11/9/19 12:20 PM, Nemo Nusquam wrote:
>> I was reading the comments on Hackaday on UNIX at 50
>> (https://hackaday.com/2019/11/05/will-the-real-unix-please-stand-up/).
>> As expected, a lot of manure but some interesting comments from
>> seemingly knowledgeable people.
>>
>> One comment
>> (https://hackaday.com/2019/11/05/will-the-real-unix-please-stand-up/#comment-6192977),
>> from a DDS, stated that (s)he worked at The Bell and they wrote it
>> "unix" (lower-case) to distinguish it from MULTICS. Anyone care to
>> comment on this?
>>
>> N.
>
> It was always my understanding, based totally on hearsay from
> engineers from both Sun and SGI back in my early days with it, UNIX is
> the OS, while unix, or vmunix is the kernel. Unix was deprecated by
> the time it became a real commercial product.
>
> So, right or wrong, I've always used UNIX for the OS, and unix, or
> vmunix as appropriate, to refer to the kernel.
>
> - Derrik
>
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual