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 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 from Professor Nichlaus
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 hilarious National Lampoon 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 casual users' frustration levels, calling
it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more risque
allusions. Then 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 technological parody, but we are impressed with
the tenacity (if not common sense) of the general Unix and C
programmer. In any event, Brian, Dennis and I have been working
exclusively in Pascal on the Apple Macintosh for the past few
years and 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 comment at this time.
Borland International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C tools, including
the popular Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Turbo C++, 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. An IBM spokesman broke into
uncontrolled laughter and had to postpone a hastily convened news
conference concerning the fate of the RS-6000, merely stating 'VM will be
available Real Soon Now'. In a cryptic statement, Professor Wirth of the
ETH institute and father of the Pascal, Modula 2 and Oberon structured
languages, merely stated that P. T. Barnum was correct.

In a related late-breaking story, usually reliable sources are stating that
a similar confession may be forthcoming from William Gates concerning the
MS-DOS and Windows operating environments. And IBM spokesmen have begun
denying that the Virtual Machine (VM) product is an internal prank gone
awry.

[COMPUTERWORLD 1 May]
[contributed by Bernard L. Hayes]
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