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Aucbvax.4756 fa.unix-wizards utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!unix-wizards Wed Oct 28 12:38:28 1981 Origin of UNIX >From dan@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

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