from Hacker News

Thompson, Ritchie and Kernighan admit that Unix was a prank (1989)

by imran3740 on 8/21/20, 6:33 PM with 15 comments

• by kickingvegas on 8/21/20, 7:17 PM

  I'll always remember a backhanded remark Mary Shaw (https://www.isri.cmu.edu/people/core-faculty/shaw-mary.html) made about AT&T Bell Labs at a talk she gave about Computer Architecture as the "New Jersey School of Computation."

• by User23 on 8/21/20, 7:26 PM

  This looks like a good place to link the Unix Hater’s Handbook[1]

  [1] https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

• by variaga on 8/21/20, 6:54 PM

  The copyright on the page says 2013, but I think this was actually written in 1989 ("20 years ago", "1969")

• by java-man on 8/21/20, 7:10 PM

  "At one time, we joked about selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science progress back 20 or more years."

  Hilarious. Ended up selling it to everybody.

  But seriously, given the long history of failures (i.e. search CVE database for buffer overflow), this joke does read like a true story.

• by ThePowerOfFuet on 8/21/20, 7:07 PM

  > This piece was found on Usenet. This is fiction, not reality. Always remember that this is not true. It's really a joke, right? -- Editor

• by dylan604 on 8/21/20, 7:58 PM

  "Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don’t think that is a coincidence."

  Nice. Does this mean to be a successful Unix Admin you also need to be an accomplished psychonaut?

• by dennis_jeeves on 8/22/20, 12:30 AM

  >Dennis Ritchie said: "What really tore it (just when ADA was catching on), was that Bjarne Stroustrup caught onto our joke

  Lol.