Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!dcl-cs!aber-cs!athene!pcg From: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: UNIX Message-ID: Date: 14 Nov 90 14:31:00 GMT References: <43115@mips.mips.COM> Sender: aro@aber-cs.UUCP Organization: Coleg Prifysgol Cymru Lines: 30 Nntp-Posting-Host: odin In-reply-to: mark@mips.COM's message of 13 Nov 90 00:35:07 GMT On 13 Nov 90 00:35:07 GMT, mark@mips.COM (Mark G. Johnson) said: mark> Looks like folks are now beginning to credit the development mark> of UNIX to Kernighan and Ritchie, but I thought the principal mark> investigators were *Thompson* and Ritchie. Did something change? From what I understand, Thompson and Ritchie wrote the Unix Kernel, mostly by themselves, up to V7 included (one did IO, the other the rest). But a crew of various colleagues of those two wrote most the of UNIX utilities; Bourne the shell, Kernighan Weinberger coded AWK (I think mostly Kernighan) with design help from Aho, the late Ossanna [tn]roff, Bourne the V7 shell, Kernighan again produced ditroff and pic, Ritchie himself the first C compiler, Johnson the pcc, Lesk a number of text processing thingies, and many others that I omit for brevity. Kernighan, Ritchie (and Pike) are the names most frequently associated with Unix because they wrote the C language book and the Unix environment book on which most UNIX programmers start. Therefore they have enjoyed more public exposure than Thompson, which (I seem to remember) arguably considers UNIX mostly a development system for chess machines... :-) As far I can see, the fundamental Unix flavour is from Thompson, the fundamental C flavour is from Ritchie. -- Piercarlo Grandi | ARPA: pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk