Bruce writes:

> >Another strange but true fact.....the UNI in Unix stands for one, yep
>  >you guessed it, Unix was originaly designed to be a single user OS.
>
>  No, this is a false fact. "Unix" is a play on "Multics" and Multics is
>  another one of those technologically-superior but otherwise-ignored
>  operating systems. Multics was also large and complex, and Unix was
>  designed to be small and simple.

Well, sort of. Emmet isn't completely off-base. UNIX was originally named
UNICS (uniplexed information and control system), as Bruce says, a play on
MULTICS (multiplexed information and control system). MULTICS was an ambitious
operating system development project that Bell Labs, GE, and a few others
joined in. Ultimately, the project fell apart, like all large projects, and to
my knowledge never did produce a fully working operating system that could be
commerically released.

UNICS, in contrast, was an off-in-the-corner, small-scale project in Bell
Labs, developed on a PDP-7, by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and others in
1969, comtemporarily with the MULTICS work.

In UNICS' first few years of incarnation, it's primary use as a text document
processor, essentially a single-user word-processor.

The need to share files and documents among multiple users drove the word
processing capabilities into more and more of a true multiuser operating
system. The entire UNICS code was rewritten in the then-new C language in 1971
and was renamed UNIX (rather than the similar sounding homonym, EUNUCHS, as
some people still prefer to believe :-).

Because the operating system was written in a high-level language, rather than
in low-level machine code for a particular platform, UNIX was declared to be
"portable". And because Bell Telephone was, at the time, specifically
prohibited by government regulations from selling computers or software, they
leased C and UNIX to universities for a dollar a year (which is one dollar
higher than most universities want to pay for anything). Nonetheless, the
price was cheap enough and the code open enough and intriguingly complex
enough that it made the nearly perfect academic subject. There were semesters
worth of lectures there in the code for the taking -- and plenty of graduate
theses awaiting in the Bell Labs-released not-so-optimized code. As they say,
the rest is history.

Wirt Atmar