11 May
2022
11 May
'22
7:57 p.m.
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know better than me, but I can find no historical reference to this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/UnixEditionZ…
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