From: awright@gssec.bt.co.uk (Alan Wright)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Looking for April 1st C history
Date: 22 Dec 92 18:02:59 GMT
Organization: BT, Software Engineering Centre, Glasgow, UK

Is this what you're looking for?

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>
>           I n t e r n a t i o n a l   N e w s   S e r v i c e
> INS TECHNOLOGY WATCH:                   [Mike Taylor, INS Correspondent]
> =====================                                  Nattick, MA, USA]
> COMPUTERWORLD 1 May
>                       CREATORS ADMIT UNIX, C HOAX
>
>    In  an announcement  that  has  stunned  the  computer  industry, Ken
> Thompson, Dennis  Ritchie and  Brian Kernighan  admitted that   the Unix
> operating system  and C  programming  language  created  by  them  is an
> elaborate April Fools prank kept alive for over  20 years.   Speaking at
> the recent UnixWorld Software  Development Forum,  Thompson revealed the
> following:
>
>            "In  1969, AT&T  had  just  terminated  their  work  with
>        the GE/Honeywell/AT&T Multics project.  Brian and  I had just
>        started   working with   an early   release of   Pascal  from
>        Professor Nichlaus  Wirth's ETH  labs in  Switzerland  and we
>        were impressed with its elegant simplicity and power.  Dennis
>        had just finished reading 'Bored of  the Rings',  a hilarious
>        National  Lampoon parody  of the  great Tolkien  'Lord of the
>        Rings' trilogy.  As a lark, we decided to do parodies  of the
>        Multics   environment  and   Pascal.   Dennis   and   I  were
>        responsible for  the operating   environment.  We   looked at
>        Multics and  designed the  new system  to be  as  complex and
>        cryptic as  possible to  maximize casual   users' frustration
>        levels, calling it Unix as  a parody  of Multics,  as well as
>        other more risque allusions.  Then Dennis and Brian worked on
>        a truly warped version of Pascal, called 'A'.  When  we found
>        others were actually trying to  create real  programs with A,
>        we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into
>        B, BCPL and finally C. We stopped when we got a clean compile
>        on the following syntax:
>
>    for(;P("\n"),R-;P("|"))for(e=C;e-;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("|"+(*u/4) %2);
>
>        To think that modern programmers would try to  use a
>        language  that  allowed  such  a  statement  was  beyond  our
>        comprehension!  We actually  thought of  selling this  to the
>        Soviets  to set  their computer  science progress  back 20 or
>        more years.   Imagine our  surprise when  AT&T and   other US
>        corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C!  It has
>        taken them 20 years to  develop enough  expertise to generate
>        even   marginally useful   applications  using   this  1960's
>        technological parody, but we are impressed  with the tenacity
>        (if not common sense) of the general  Unix and  C programmer.
>        In  any  event,  Brian,  Dennis  and  I   have  been  working
>        exclusively in Pascal on the Apple Macintosh for the past few
>        years and feel really guilty about  the chaos,  confusion and
>        truly bad programming that have resulted from our silly prank
>        so long ago."
>
>
>    Major Unix and  C vendors  and customers,  including AT&T, Microsoft,
> Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, and DEC  have refused  comment at  this time.
> Borland International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C tools, including
> the  popular Turbo  Pascal, Turbo  C  and  Turbo  C++,  stated  they had
> suspected this for a number of years and would continue to enhance their
> Pascal products and halt further efforts to develop C. An  IBM spokesman
> broke into uncontrolled laughter and had to postpone  a hastily convened
> news conference concerning the fate of the  RS-6000, merely  stating 'VM
> will be  available Real  Soon Now'.   In a  cryptic statement, Professor
> Wirth of the ETH institute and father of the Pascal, Modula 2 and Oberon
> structured languages, merely stated that P. T. Barnum was correct.
>
>    In  a  related  late-breaking  story,  usually  reliable  sources are
> stating that a similar confession may be forthcoming from  William Gates
> concerning the  MS-DOS  and  Windows  operating  environments.   And IBM
> spokesmen have begun denying that the Virtual Machine (VM) product is an
> internal prank gone awry.
>
> [COMPUTERWORLD 1 May]
> [contributed by Bernard L. Hayes]
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-- Alan
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awright@gssec.bt.co.uk (Alan Wright)
BT, Software Engineering Centre, Glasgow, UK
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.c