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From: sxr@cs.purdue.EDU (Saul Rosen)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: UNIX
Message-ID: <12502@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Date: 16 Nov 90 16:22:49 GMT
References: <43115@mips.mips.COM>
Sender: news@cs.purdue.EDU
Reply-To: sxr@babbage.cs.purdue.edu (Saul Rosen)
Organization: Department of Computer Science, Purdue University
Lines: 20

In article <43115@mips.mips.COM> mark@mips.COM (Mark G. Johnson) writes:
>Looks like folks are now beginning to credit the development
>of UNIX to Kernighan and Ritchie, but I thought the principal
>investigators were *Thompson* and Ritchie.  Did something change?
>

I don't read this newsgroup that thoroughly, so I didn't catch the 
three articles that Mark Johnson quotes in which the inventors of
UNIX are incorrectly identified. I am pleased that he has
taken the time to post a correction. Note that in Kernighan and Pike's
"The Unix Programming Environment" the authors state that the first
version of Unix was written in 1969 by "Ken Thompson, with ideas  and support
from Rudd Canaday, Doug McIlroy, and Dennis Ritchie" and that "In 1973
Ritchie and Thompson rewrote the Unix kernel in C..."

I am surprised and sometimes distressed by the number of incorrect
statements about the history of computing that find their way into
print (or into network postings.) 

Saul Rosen