Hacker Humor: UN*X
History
By Alan Filipski
The UN*X brand operating system was written by two computer
science researchers in a closet in the attic of a famous research
laboratory (The Labs) in the late 1960s. The authors had complete
freedom to design an operating system according to their own
wishes without management constraints. This was because everyone
at The Labs, including the management, thought they were janitors
who spent their time in the closet wringing out mops or something.
The first version of the UN*X brand operating system was a
game that simulated the gravitational motion of all known planets
and satellites of our solar system. Soon such things as a file
system and user procedures were grafted onto it. It ran on a
PDP-7 computer that someone had stored in the closet and forgotten
about.
Later the authors made the mistake of drawing attention to
themselves by asking the management for a larger computer. At
this, the management took the operating system and, supposing
it to be something of use only to hippies (or closet hippies),
sent it University of California at Berkeley.
It may be coincidental, but at the about the same time cases
of a peculiar compulsive mental disorder known as Unirexia Nervosa
were first noted in San Francisco, Calif. area. The symptoms
of this disorder are the interjection of nonsense words such
as grep, awk, runrun, and nohup by the victim into his or her
speech; the misuse of ordinary words such as cat and lint; and
the avoidance
of the use of uppercase letters.
Advanced cases of Unirexia Nervosa have been found at many
major universities throughout the U.S., where youths with pasty
complexions and sunken eyes can be found late at night subsisting
on diet pop, glaring fanatically at CRT's, and mumbling about
"one more bugs". Since for the most part this malady
has been confined to university students, it has not cause great
public alarm. But recently there have been reports of regular
people contracting the disease, even some who hold otherwise
respectable positions in industry. The mode of transmission of
Unirexia Nervosa is not known, but it is thought to have something
to do with
beards.
Members of the UN*X community have developed a novel and effective
means of communication with each other. Suppose a user named
Athol at Epizootic Systems in Cupertino, Calif., wishes to send
an electronic mail message to his friend Elba at
Perjorative Systems Inc. in Palo Alto, Calif. Although their
computers do not communicate directly, they message may be passed
via intermediate links. Athol would merely type:
mail ihnp4!allegra!ucbvax!seismo!decvax!cbosgd!ucbvax!pejor!elba
[Note: this was really the way people
sent email in the days of UUCP -- Unix to Unix Copy Protocol.
-- CM]
and then enter the text of his message. This electronic mail
would appear at Elba's terminal either within two days of the
time it takes to propagate a telephone signal 73 times between
the East and West Coasts of the U.S., whichever is greater.
Although many people think the word "UN*X" is an
acronym (or even a homonym), the word actually originated in
the following manner. When management in The Labs noticed the
strange machine running in the closet, they stopped the first
technical-looking type they saw in the hall and asked him what
it was. As fate would have it, it was not a technical type at
all but a member of a lost
Australian aboriginal tribe who had been wandering the halls
of The Lab for years without drawing attention. The fellow did
not understand English and believed they were asking him to haul
the computer away. He replied, "UN*X(tm)," which is
aboriginal for "Not my job, man." The rest is history.
More history of Unix--->>
