Unix /yoo'niks/ n.
[In the authors' words, "A weak pun on Multics"; very early on
it was `UNICS'] (also `UNIX') An interactive time-sharing system
invented in 1969 by Ken Thompson after Bell Labs left the Multics
project, originally so he could play games on his scavenged
PDP-7. Dennis Ritchie, the inventor of C, is considered a
co-author of the system. The turning point in Unix's history came
when it was reimplemented almost entirely in C during 1972-1974,
making it the first source-portable OS. Unix subsequently
underwent mutations and expansions at the hands of many different
people, resulting in a uniquely flexible and developer-friendly
environment. By 1991, Unix had become the most widely used
multiuser general-purpose operating system in the world - and
since 1996 the variiant called Linux
has been at the cutting edge of the open source movement. Many people
consider the success of Unix the most important victory yet of
hackerdom over industry opposition (but see Unix weenie and Unix conspiracy for an opposing
point of view). See Version 7,
BSD, USG
Unix, Linux.
Some people are confused over whether this word is
appropriately `UNIX' or `Unix'; both forms are common, and used
interchangeably. Dennis Ritchie says that the `UNIX' spelling
originally happened in CACM's 1974 paper "The UNIX Time-Sharing
System" because "we had a new typesetter and troff had just been invented and we were
intoxicated by being able to produce small caps." Later, dmr
tried to get the spelling changed to `Unix' in a couple of Bell
Labs papers, on the grounds that the word is not acronymic. He
failed, and eventually (his words) "wimped out" on the issue. So,
while the trademark today is `UNIX', both capitalizations are
grounded in ancient usage; the Jargon File uses `Unix' in
deference to dmr's wishes.
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Unix brain damage n.
Something that has to be done to break a network program
(typically a mailer) on a non-Unix system so that it will
interoperate with Unix systems. The hack may qualify as `Unix
brain damage' if the program conforms to published standards and
the Unix program in question does not. Unix brain damage happens
because it is much easier for other (minority) systems to change
their ways to match non-conforming behavior than it is to change
all the hundreds of thousands of Unix systems out there.
An example of Unix brain damage is a kluge in a mail server to recognize bare line
feed (the Unix newline) as an equivalent form to the Internet
standard newline, which is a carriage return followed by a line
feed. Such things can make even a hardened jock weep.
Node:Unix conspiracy, Next:Unix weenie, Previous:Unix brain
damage, Up:= U =
Unix conspiracy n.
[ITS] According to a conspiracy theory long popular among
ITS and TOPS-20 fans, Unix's growth is the result of a
plot, hatched during the 1970s at Bell Labs, whose intent was to
hobble AT&T's competitors by making them dependent upon a
system whose future evolution was to be under AT&T's control.
This would be accomplished by disseminating an operating system
that is apparently inexpensive and easily portable, but also
relatively unreliable and insecure (so as to require continuing
upgrades from AT&T). This theory was lent a substantial
impetus in 1984 by the paper referenced in the back door entry.
In this view, Unix was designed to be one of the first
computer viruses (see virus) -- but a
virus spread to computers indirectly by people and market forces,
rather than directly through disks and networks. Adherents of
this `Unix virus' theory like to cite the fact that the
well-known quotation "Unix is snake oil" was uttered by DEC president Kenneth Olsen shortly before
DEC began actively promoting its own family of Unix workstations.
(Olsen now claims to have been misquoted.)
[If there was ever such a conspiracy, it got thoroughly out of
the plotters' control after 1990. AT&T sold its UNIX
operation to Novell around the same time Linux and other free-UNIX distributions were
beginning to make noise. --ESR]