[TUHS] Capitalization question: UNIX/Unix and MULTICS/Multics?
James Frew
frew at ucsb.edu
Thu May 12 04:08:28 AEST 2022
The Book (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/multics-system - I've always
assumed this is the canonical non-mimeographed reference) uses "Multics".
/Frew
On 2022-05-11 10:13, Dan Cross wrote:
>
> 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 certainly know better than me, but I can find no historical reference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.
>
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