11 May
2022
11 May
'22
11:13 p.m.
This is tangentially related to Unix, and came up randomly at work
yesterday.
In Kernighan's Unix memoir, on page 9, he touches briefly on the typography
of "Unix":
"(Multics was originally spelled MULTICS, but the lower-case version is
less visually jarring; as with UNIX versus Unix and some other all-caps
words, I’ll use the nicer-looking form even though it’s not historically
accurate.)"
Here, he is talking about interning at MIT in 1966. bwk would certainly
know better than me, but I can find no historical reference to this
"MULTICS" spelling; is anyone familiar with that? The earliest reference I
can find (the 1965 paper from the FJCC:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1463891.1463912) uses the more "Multics"
styling, but it may have been typeset later.
Alternatively, could someone send me Brian's email address?
- Dan C.