
Thompson, Ritchie and Kernighan admit that Unix was a prank (1989) - imran3740
http://www.stokely.com/lighter.side/unix.prank.html
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kickingvegas
I'll always remember a backhanded remark Mary Shaw
([https://www.isri.cmu.edu/people/core-faculty/shaw-
mary.html](https://www.isri.cmu.edu/people/core-faculty/shaw-mary.html)) made
about AT&T Bell Labs at a talk she gave about Computer Architecture as the
"New Jersey School of Computation."

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User23
This looks like a good place to link the Unix Hater’s Handbook[1]

[1]
[https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf](https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf)

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djsumdog
360 pages?!

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gowld
It's Volume 1.

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variaga
The copyright on the page says 2013, but I think this was actually written in
1989 ("20 years ago", "1969")

~~~
variaga
also really classy to put their own copyright notice on a document "found on
usenet and the author could not be determined"

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djsumdog
probably just a standard footer that wraps everything

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variaga
Yeah, probably, but that still doesn't make it right.

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java-man
"At one time, we joked about selling this to the Soviets to set their computer
science progress back 20 or more years."

Hilarious. Ended up selling it to everybody.

But seriously, given the long history of failures (i.e. search CVE database
for buffer overflow), this joke does read like a true story.

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ThePowerOfFuet
> This piece was found on Usenet. This is fiction, not reality. Always
> remember that this is not true. It's really a joke, right? -- Editor

~~~
djsumdog
Nah, I refuse to believe it. Death to the author. Poe's Law and all that.

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dylan604
"Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don’t think
that is a coincidence."

Nice. Does this mean to be a successful Unix Admin you also need to be an
accomplished psychonaut?

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dennis_jeeves
>Dennis Ritchie said: "What really tore it (just when ADA was catching on),
was that Bjarne Stroustrup caught onto our joke

Lol.

