Thank you, Doug.

I wrote to Brian, who responded very quickly, suggesting that he was likely
mistaken. He's going to make a note in the errata for his memoir.

Tom Van Vleck also wrote saying that he was unaware of there ever being an
acronymic rendering, and that he recalled an early meeting in which Jerry
Saltzer was quite adamant that Multics was a proper noun, not an acronym,
and therefore mixed-case. He did say that occasionally people joining the
project would mistakenly write 'MULTICS' until corrected; apparently some
of the GE folks in Phoenix were in the habit of doing this, perhaps due to
prior familiarity with GECOS.

        - Dan C.


On Wed, May 11, 2022 at 7:49 PM Douglas McIlroy <
douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> The main FJCC 1964 papar, by Vyssotsky, Corbato, and Graham, spelled
> Multics with an initial cap. By contrast, Ken transcribed the aural
> pun as UNIX. The lawyers did their best to keep it that way after most
> of us had decided it looks better as a proper noun.
> As I recall, there was an acronymic reading of Multics, but it wasn't
> taken seriously enough to drag the word into all caps. Nobody proposed
> an acronymic reading  of UNIX. So both words defy the convention of
> rendering acronyms in upper-case.
>
> Doug
>