Ok, here's my memory of void *, blurred as it may be by time. Void was put into C, but it was actually not necessary by itself -- the default return type was int, and if nobody was using the value there was no particular reason to use it.  So only those who were practitioners of the strong-type religion tended to use it.  A major problem in making C strongly typed was deciding on a return type for malloc.  It had traditionally returned char *, but this would require a cast to allow you to allocate things other than characters. I was at a /usr/grp conference at the alcohol-fueled reception talking to Charlie Roberts about the problems of making C more strongly typed.  The topic of malloc came up.  All of a sudden Charlie got a huge grin on his face and said "Hey!  Why don't we have malloc return void *".   It took me a minute or two to even understand what void * could possibly mean, but the idea was an instant winner.   I seem to recall it was done a week or two later.   The idea may have simply ready to be born and others may have had it as well, but this is what I remember of it.  And the experience sticks in my mind as being an almost literal example of being "struck by an idea". Steve ----- Original Message ----- From: &quot;jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel" <Chiappa)> To:<tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org> Cc:<jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Sent:Sun, 5 Nov 2017 10:43:06 -0500 (EST) Subject:Re: [TUHS] origins of void* I can imagine! The V6 kernel had all sorts of, ah, 'unusual' typing - as I learned to my cost when I did that hack version of 'splice()' (to allow a process in a pipline to drop out, and join the two pipes together directly), which I did in V6 (my familiar kernel haunt). Since a lot of code does pointer math to generate wait 'channel' numbers, e.g.: sleep(ip+2, PPIPE); when I naively (out of habit) tried to declare my pointers to be the correct type, the math didn't work any more! ('ip', in this particular case, was declared to be an 'int *'.) No doubt part of this was inherited from older versions (of the system, and C); the code was working, and there was no call to tweak it. The lack of casts/coercion in the V6 C compiler may have been an issue, too - I had to do some equally odd things to make my splice() code work! Noel