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

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

#3
post #2

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

also really classy to put their own copyright notice on a document "found on usenet and the author could not be determined"

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

#6
"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.

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

#10
post #3
post #2

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

also really classy to put their own copyright notice on a document "found on usenet and the author could not be determined"

probably just a standard footer that wraps everything
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