5 Apr
2017
5 Apr
'17
3:01 a.m.
Joerg Schilling:
Interesting that they created a name clash:
"p" was the name of a pager on UNOS, the first realtime
UNIX lookalike from former AT&T employees.
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p was something Rob Pike brought when he arrived in
1980. I believe he wrote its first version several
years earlier, when he was at the University of Toronto.
Since UNOS dates from 1981 (says Wikipedia), I think
Rob's p gets precedence.
Not that it matters. There never was, nor should there
ever have been, some global register of UNIX command
names during its formative years. UNIX was a research
platform and a living work-in-progress until it became
productized in the latter part of the 1980s.
And, of course, UNOS was a lookalike written from scratch.
It wasn't UNIX. If it wanted to be, it should have
adopted Rob's p!
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
(Not in a particularly serious mood)