[PLUG] RIP - Dennis Ritchie

[Robert Munro]

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On Thu, 13 Oct 2011 19:02:04 -0500 Fred James wrote:
>>> Wayne E. Van Loon Sr. wrote:
>>> 
>>>>> Pete Lancashire wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>>> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/10/dennis-ritchie/
>>>>
>>>>>>> 
>>> 
>>>>> This story may be apocryphal, and, I can't recall just
>>>>> where I read or heard it, but the story goes that Dennis
>>>>> Ritchie was on a committee at Bell Labs that was outlining
>>>>> a new computer operating system. Some on the committee were
>>>>> more conservative the Ritchie, who started referring to the
>>>>> committee as the "eunuchs committee". The name for the
>>>>> operating systems was later sanitized, of course, to Unix. 
>>>>> Wayne
>>>>> 
>>> I believe the name was meant to be a play on Multics.
>>> 
>>> http://www.livinginternet.com/i/iw_unix_dev.htm 
>>> http://www.multicians.org/unix.html
>>> 
> And ... <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix>

I like the "eunuchs committee" story lots better than the "Unics" story.

The wikipedia entry seems to be a good overview and objective about
the checkered, if not tortured path of Unix development to what we
have now.

For those who enjoy Unix history, there is another narrative written
by Dr Peter Salus that's available free online at Groklaw:

http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20051013231901859 .

I'm happy to have missed the Unix wars and all the turmoil they
created while I was ignoring it and working on IBM mainframes instead,
but I do like where it wound up in Linux, even if it uses
little-endian machines.

Robert

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