Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!csri.toronto.edu!wayne
From: wayne@csri.toronto.edu (Wayne Hayes)
Subject: Re: GNU story wanted!
Message-ID: <1989Jun28.144832.21244@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>
Organization: University of Toronto, CSRI
References: <7364@cs.Buffalo.EDU>

In article <7364@cs.Buffalo.EDU> ugleung@cs.Buffalo.EDU (Leung Lee) writes:
>I have one fundamental question.  What is the story concerning the
>frequent use of "GNU" as a prefix to many Unix programs, such a emacs,
>troff, etc.  I realized this probably has its origin in the American
>culture!  Is this correct!  Can anyone give some kind of historical
>insights?

Well, I think the GNU people would be quite impressed (maybe) if somebody
thought that GNU had it's origins in American Culture. Actually, in some
ways (somewhat anti-commercial) GNU is exactly not that. Note that I am
in no way affiliated with GNU; just a happy user of their products.
	GNU stands for "GNU's not UNIX", and it is, as the originators
say, "recursively defined", since the acronym contains itself. This is
supposed to be funny ;-). It is a group of people (founded by the author
of the original Emacs, Richard Stallman) who are in the process of creating
a freely-redistributable re-write (from scratch) of UXIX, (System V, I
believe). They already have what I consider to be the best ANSI C compiler
on the market (gcc), a fabulous (e|f)grep family, awk, make, bison (a yacc
clone), among much more. And the really incredible thing is that the
*complete* source code is also available. I've ported over a whole bunch
of their stuff to the Amiga without difficulty (unfortunately it's impossible
to port most of the stuff to the 80x86, x<3 family because of the segmented
memory architecture...).
	If you have access to a UNIX machine, type "man gcc", "man emacs",
man gnu, or ask your system administrator where the GNU subdirectories
are on your file system. And then look at the file "COPYING", "MANIFESTO",
and a few other text files. They'll tell you all about it. It's quite
fascinating and inspiring!


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"Open the pod bay doors, HAL."   "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
Wayne Hayes	INTERNET: wayne@csri.toronto.edu	CompuServe: 72401,3525