From harvard!sppip7.lkg.dec.com!jc Tue Mar 17 13:58:02 1992 Return-Path: Received: by minya.uucp (/\=-/\ Smail3.1.18.1 #18.16) id ; Tue, 17 Mar 92 13:58 EST Received: by harvard.harvard.edu (5.54/a0.25) (for jc) id AA23577; Tue, 17 Mar 92 11:55:07 EST Received: from PRINT-SRV.BU.EDU by BU.EDU (1.99) Tue, 17 Mar 92 11:55:03 EST Received: from crl.dec.com by print-srv.bu.edu (5.61+++/client-cf.2.1) id AA17628; Tue, 17 Mar 92 11:51:18 -0500 Received: by crl.dec.com; id AA04057; Tue, 17 Mar 92 11:39:08 -0500 Received: by sppip7.lkg.dec.com (5.57/ULTRIX-fma-071891); id AA04334; Tue, 17 Mar 92 09:01:23 -0500 Message-Id: <9203171401.AA04334@sppip7.lkg.dec.com> To: trillian.mit.edu!minya.uucp!jc, minya!jc Subject: C/Unix was a joke... Date: Tue, 17 Mar 92 09:01:21 EST From: harvard!sppip7.lkg.dec.com!jc ------- Forwarded Message Return-Path: MAILER-DAEMON Received: by sppip7.lkg.dec.com (5.57/ULTRIX-fma-071891); id AA02822; Mon, 16 Mar 92 16:35:57 -0500 Date: Mon, 16 Mar 92 16:35:57 -0500 From: MAILER-DAEMON (Mail Delivery Subsystem) Subject: Returned mail: Cannot send message for 3 days To: jc ----- Transcript of session follows ----- 421 crl.dec.com.tcp... Deferred: Connection timed out during user open with decpa.pa.dec.com ----- Unsent message follows ----- Received: by sppip7.lkg.dec.com (5.57/ULTRIX-fma-071891); id AA21585; Fri, 13 Mar 92 15:47:23 -0500 Date: Fri, 13 Mar 92 15:47:23 -0500 From: jc (John Chambers) To: jchome Subject: rec.humor #78067 - Re: Wanted: Bell Labs says C was a joke In article <1992Mar7.125848.22824@paramount.nikhefk.nikhef.nl>, maart@paramount.nikhefk.nikhef.nl (Maarten Litmaath) writes: Path: nntpd.lkg.dec.com!pa.dec.com!decwrl!uunet!mcsun!sun4nl!nikhefk!maart From: maart@paramount.nikhefk.nikhef.nl (Maarten Litmaath) Newsgroups: comp.unix.misc,rec.humor Subject: Re: Wanted: Bell Labs says C was a joke Message-ID: <1992Mar7.125848.22824@paramount.nikhefk.nikhef.nl> Date: Sat, 7 Mar 92 07:58:48 GMT-)1:44 References: Organization: Nat. Inst. for Nuclear and High-Energy Physics, Amsterdam Lines: 102 Xref: nntpd.lkg.dec.com comp.unix.misc:3790 rec.humor:78067 pzs@ficus.webo.dg.com (Peter Z. Simpson) writes: \ \ I'm looking for a copy of the phony press release I saw around \Christmas time. The gist of it was that C and UNIX were a prank that \got out of hand & Bell Labs wasn't going to let it go on any longer. \ \ It had a nice example of unreadable but supposedly legal C code \and mentioned something about K&R typing a line of garbage & then \betting they could come up with a compiler in which the garbage was \legal code. : This is a shar archive. Extract with sh, not csh. : This archive ends with exit, so do not worry about trailing junk. : --------------------------- cut here -------------------------- PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/ucb echo Extracting 'Hoax' sed 's/^X//' > 'Hoax' << '+ END-OF-FILE ''Hoax' X X X X T h e V O G O N N e w s S e r v i c e X XVNS TECHNOLOGY WATCH: [Mike Taylor, VNS Correspondent] X===================== [Littleton, MA, USA ] X XCOMPUTERWORLD 1 April X X CREATORS ADMIT UNIX, C HOAX X X In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson, X Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating X system and C programming language created by them is an elaborate April X Fools prank kept alive for over 20 years. Speaking at the recent X UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson revealed the following: X X "In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work with the GE/Honeywell/AT&T X Multics project. Brian and I had just started working with an early X release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth's ETH labs in X Switzerland and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and X power. Dennis had just finished reading 'Bored of the Rings', a X hilarious National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien 'Lord of the X Rings' trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics X environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the operating X environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as X complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration X levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more X risque allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped X version of Pascal, called 'A'. When we found others were actually X trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional X cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL and finally C. We stopped X when we got a clean compile on the following syntax: X X for(;P("\n"),R-;P("|"))for(e=C;e-;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2); X X To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that X allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually X thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science X progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&T and X other US corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C! It has X taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to generate even X marginally useful applications using this 1960's technological parody, X but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense) of the X general Unix and C programmer. In any event, Brian, Dennis and I have X been working exclusively in Pascal on the Apple Macintosh for the past X few years and feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion and truly X bad programming that have resulted from our silly prank so long ago." X X Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including AT&T, Microsoft, X Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, and DEC have refused comment at this time. X Borland International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C tools, X including the popular Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Turbo C++, stated they X had suspected this for a number of years and would continue to enhance X their Pascal products and halt further efforts to develop C. An IBM X spokesman broke into uncontrolled laughter and had to postpone a X hastily convened news conference concerning the fate of the RS-6000, X merely stating 'VM will be available Real Soon Now'. In a cryptic X statement, Professor Wirth of the ETH institute and father of the X Pascal, Modula 2 and Oberon structured languages, merely stated that P. X T. Barnum was correct. X X In a related late-breaking story, usually reliable sources are stating X that a similar confession may be forthcoming from William Gates X concerning the MS-DOS and Windows operating environments. And IBM X spokesman have begun denying that the Virtual Machine (VM) product is X an internal prank gone awry. X {COMPUTERWORLD 1 April} X {contributed by Bernard L. Hayes} X X<><><><><><><><> VNS Edition : 2336 Tuesday 4-Jun-1991 <><><><><><><><> X X X + END-OF-FILE Hoax chmod 'u=rw,g=r,o=r' 'Hoax' set `wc -c 'Hoax'` count=$1 case $count in 4059) :;; *) echo 'Bad character count in ''Hoax' >&2 echo 'Count should be 4059' >&2 esac exit 0 - -- Zippy-Says: If you can't say something nice, say something surrealistic. ------- End of Forwarded Message