> Creators Admit UNIX, C Hoax
> ---------------------------
> 
> In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson,
> Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating system
> and C programming language created by them is an elaborate prank kept
> alive for over 20 years. Speaking at the recent UnixWorld Software
> Development Forum, Thompson revealed the following:
> 
> "In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work with the GE/Honeywell/AT&T
> Multics project.  Brian and I had started work with an early release of
> Pascal from Professor Niklaus Wirth's ETH labs in Switzerland and we
> were impressed with its elegant simplicity and power.  Dennis had just
> finished reading 'Bored of the Rings', a National Lampoon parody of the
> Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy.  As a lark, we decided to do
> parodies of the Multics environment and Pascal.  Dennis and I were
> responsible for the operating environment.  We looked at Multics and
> designed the new OS to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize
> casual users' frustration levels, calling it Unix as a parody of
> Multics, as well as other more risque allusions.  We sold the terse
> command language to novitiates by telling them that it saved them
> typing.
> 
> Then Dennis and Brian worked on a warped version of Pascal, called 'A'.
> 'A' looked a lot like Pascal, but elevated the notion of the direct
> memory address (which Wirth had banished) to the central concept of the
> language.  This was Dennis's contribution, and he in fact coined the term
> "pointer" as an innocuous sounding name for a truly malevolent construct.
> 
> Brian must be credited with the idea of having absolutely no standard I/O
> specification:  this ensured that at least 50% of the typical commercial
> program would have to be re-coded when changing hardware platforms.
> Brian was also responsible for pitching this lack of I/O as a feature: it
> allowed us to describe the language as "truly portable".
> 
> When we found others were actually creating real programs with A, we
> removed compulsory type-checking on function arguments. Later, we added a
> notion we called "casting": this allowed the programmer to treat an
> integer as though it were a 50kb user-defined structure.  When we found
> that some programmers were simply not using pointers, we eliminated the
> ability to pass structures to functions, enforcing their use in even the
> simplest applications.  We sold this, and many other features, as
> enhancements to the efficiency of the language. In this way, our prank
> evolved into B, BCPL, and finally C.
> 
> We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:
> 
> for(;P("\n"),R-;P("|"))for(e=3D3DC;e-;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);
> 
> At one time, we joked about selling this to the Soviets to set their
> computer science progress back 20 or more years.
> 
> Unfortunately, AT&T and other US corporations actually began using Unix
> and C.  We decided we'd better keep mum, assuming it was just a passing
> phase.
> 
> In fact, it's taken US companies over 20 years to develop enough
> expertise to generate useful applications using this 1960's technological
> parody. We are impressed with the tenacity of the general Unix and C
> programmer. In fact, Brian, Dennis and I have never ourselves attempted
> to write a commercial application in this environment.
> 
> We feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion and truly awesome
> programming projects that have resulted from our silly prank so long
> ago."
> 
> Dennis Ritchie said:  "What really tore it (just when ADA was catching
> on), was that Bjarne Stroustrup caught onto our joke. He extended it to
> further parody Smalltalk.  Like us, he was caught by surprise when nobody
> laughed.  So he added multiple inheritance, virtual base classes, and
> later ... templates.  So we now have compilers that can
> compile 100,000 lines per second, but need to process header files for 25
> minutes before they get to the meat of "Hello, World".
> 
> Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including AT&T, Microsoft,
> Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, and DEC have refused comment at this time.
> 
> Borland International, a leading vendor of object-oriented tools,
> including the popular Turbo Pascal and Borland C++, stated they had
> suspected this for a couple of years.  In fact, the notoriously late
> Quattro Pro for Windows was originally written in C++.  Philippe Kahn
> said: "After two and a half years programming, and massive programmer
> burn-outs, we re-coded the whole thing in Turbo Pascal in three months.
> I think it's fair to say that Turbo Pascal saved our bacon".  Another
> Borland spokesman said that they would continue to enhance their Pascal
> products and halt further efforts to develop C/C++.
> 
> Professor Wirth of the ETH institute and father of the Pascal, Modula 2
> and Oberon structured languages, cryptically said "P.T. Barnum was
> right."   He had no further comments.
>