Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sm.unisys.com!ism780c!kirkl
From: kirkl@ism780c.isc.com (Kirk Lillis)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: what does "UNIX" really stand for? (also Plan 9)
Message-ID: <18479@ism780c.isc.com>
Date: 26 Oct 88 14:11:43 GMT
References: <3521@phri.UUCP> <2156@cloud9.UUCP>
Reply-To: kirkl@ism780c.UUCP (Kirk Lillis)
Organization: Interactive Systems Corp., Santa Monica CA
Lines: 23

In article <2156@cloud9.UUCP> bob@cloud9.UUCP (Bob Toxen) writes:
>> The way I heard it was as follows.  ... "You: nix!", ...
>Sorry, no.  UNIX is a play on names of Multics.  The latter was supposed
>to be all things to all people with every feature including the
>kitchen sink.  The modern counterpart is Ada.
>
>Ken conceived of UNIX as one thing to one person and its simple elegence,
>high performance, easier programming has made it much less popular than
>DOS which has uh, um, ahh...


The way I recall it (from Tannenbaum's book on operating systems) is that 
MULTICS stood for MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service.  An associate 
of Dennis and Ken's at Bell Labs called their scaled down version UNICS, for 
UNiplexed Information and Computing Service.  This nameplay evolved into UNIX.




--KirkL


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