9 Nov
2019
9 Nov
'19
10:23 p.m.
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.
On Sat, Nov 9, 2019 at 4:06 PM Mary Ann Horton <mah(a)mhorton.net> wrote:
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:
--
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
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…)
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