CREATORS ADMIT C AND UNIX A HOAX! -- MIDRANGE-L

Set to me by a colleague of mine from Australia:
I came across this on a web site today. I'm not sure of it's authenticity,
but like a true AS/400 bigot, will pass it on!!! (Maybe it is an April fools
joke in itself??)
CREATORS ADMIT C AND UNIX A 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 April Fools 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 just started working
with an early release of Pascal and we were impressed with its elegant
simplicity and power. Dennis had just finished reading 'Bored of the Rings',
a hilarious parody of the great Tolkien '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 system to be as complex and cryptic as possible
to maximize users' frustration levels, calling it UNIX as a parody of
Multics. Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called
'A'. When we found others were actually trying to create real programs with
A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and 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=C;e-;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("|"+(*u/4)%2)
To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that allowed
such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually thought of
selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science progress back 20
or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&T and other US corporations
actually began trying to use UNIX and C! It has taken them 20 years to
develop enough expertise to generate even marginally useful applications
using this 1960's technology parody, but we are still impressed with the
tenacity of the UNIX and C programmer. In any event, Brian, Dennis and I
feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion and truly bad programming that
have resulted from our silly prank so long ago."
Major UNIX and C vendors and customers, including AT&T, Microsoft,
Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, and DEC have refused to comment at this time.
Borland International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C tools, stated they
had suspected this for a number of years and would continue to enhance their
Pascal products and halt further efforts to develop C. IBM is still
hell-bent on making their bread/butter language RPG look like C. Go figure.


Kenneth

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Kenneth E. Graap
IBM Certified Specialist
AS/400e Professional System Administrator
NW Natural (Gas Services)
keg@nwnatural.com
Phone: 503-226-4211 x5537
FAX:    603-849-0591
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