The Unix Heritage Society mailing list
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
* Re: [TUHS] Capitalization question: UNIX/Unix and MULTICS/Multics?
@ 2022-05-11 23:47 Douglas McIlroy
  2022-05-12  0:34 ` Dan Cross
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 5+ messages in thread
From: Douglas McIlroy @ 2022-05-11 23:47 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

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

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 5+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Capitalization question: UNIX/Unix and MULTICS/Multics?
@ 2022-05-11 19:57 Noel Chiappa
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 5+ messages in thread
From: Noel Chiappa @ 2022-05-11 19:57 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs; +Cc: jnc

    > From: Dan Cross

    > In Kernighan's Unix memoir, on page 9, he touches briefly on the
    > typography of "Unix":
    > "(Multics was originally spelled MULTICS ..."
    > Here, he is talking about interning at MIT in 1966. bwk would certainly
    > know better than me, but I can find no historical reference to this
    > "MULTICS" spelling; is anyone familiar with that?

I looked at my early Multics stuff, and it's "Multics" almost everywhere:

- "GE-645 System Manual", GE, 1968
- "The Multics Virtual Memory", GE, 1970
- "Introduction to Multics", MIT MAC TR-123, 1973

However, in my "A New Remote-Access Man-Machine System", on the title papge
it says "Reprints of the MULTICS system presented at the" [FJCC, 1965]. No clue as
to who printed it, or when - and all the FJCC papers themselves use "Multics".

I have yet to ask Jerry Saltzer, but I suspect that if it ever was 'MULTICS',
it was at a _very_ early stage, and was formally changed even before the FJCC
papers (which were themselves very early).


BTW, ISTR hearing that it was 'Unix' originally, and the 'UNIX' spelling was
adopted at the insistence of Bell lawyers. So I went looking for an early
(i.e. PDP-7 era) scanned document, to see what it was then, and all I could
find was:

  https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/McIlroy_v0/UnixEditionZero.pdf

which seems to be from just after the PDP-7 -> PDP-11/20 transition, and it
uses 'UNIX'. Would the Bell lawyers have already been involved at that stage?

	Noel

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 5+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Capitalization question: UNIX/Unix and MULTICS/Multics?
@ 2022-05-11 17:13 Dan Cross
  2022-05-11 18:08 ` James Frew
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 5+ messages in thread
From: Dan Cross @ 2022-05-11 17:13 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 878 bytes --]

This is tangentially related to Unix, and came up randomly at work
yesterday.

In Kernighan's Unix memoir, on page 9, he touches briefly on the typography
of "Unix":

"(Multics was originally spelled MULTICS, but the lower-case version is
less visually jarring; as with UNIX versus Unix and some other all-caps
words, I’ll use the nicer-looking  form even though it’s not historically
accurate.)"

Here, he is talking about interning at MIT in 1966. bwk would certainly
know better than me, but I can find no historical reference to this
"MULTICS" spelling; is anyone familiar with that? The earliest reference I
can find (the 1965 paper from the FJCC:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1463891.1463912) uses the more "Multics"
styling, but it may have been typeset later.

Alternatively, could someone send me Brian's email address?

        - Dan C.

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1603 bytes --]

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 5+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2022-05-12  0:36 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 5+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2022-05-11 23:47 [TUHS] Capitalization question: UNIX/Unix and MULTICS/Multics? Douglas McIlroy
2022-05-12  0:34 ` Dan Cross
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2022-05-11 19:57 Noel Chiappa
2022-05-11 17:13 Dan Cross
2022-05-11 18:08 ` James Frew

This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).