Origin of UNIX

[utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!unix-wizards]

>From dan at BBN-UNIX Wed Oct 28 11:48:57 1981
UNIX was named by analogy with Multics (Multiplexed Information
and Computing System), whose development began at about the same time,
and which was originally a joint Bell/GE/MIT project. The name
was intended to contrast the UNIX philosophy of providing a small,
unified system whose elements could be readily combined
with what Bell people perceived as the Multics attitude
of providing many individual commands, each with many options,
to perform different functions. Or so Brian Kernighan told me
when I asked him (more or less).

This attitude notwithstanding, the two systems share a fair amount of
philosophy (and originally shared some people). Both can be customized
by the user to an enormous degree--more than any other mainframe
operating system of the era (or even today, perhaps). Multics goes much
further than UNIX in this direction; its dynamic linking makes it possible
and practical to replace system routines like "printf" ("ioa_" to Multicians)
with the user's own, not to mention the error-printing routine,
the pathname resolution routine, etc.

Those of us who have used both Multics and UNIX sometimes refer to UNIX
as a castrated version of Multics... this was NOT, however, the origin
of the name.
          Dan Franklin