6 Jun
2006
6 Jun
'06
9:41 a.m.
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