# The truth about C & Unix history



## igorino (Jan 7, 2016)

http://www.rutschle.net/tech/c_unix.shtml


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## Oko (Jan 7, 2016)

Oh dear why are you posting that nonsense  Celebrating Eastern Orthodox Christmas prevents me from making the longer post but these are the facts.


*Niklaus Wirth* wrote the Pascal as a toy/instructional language (it was my first programming language in early 80s when I was in the middle school). The creators of UNIX had very strong low opinion of the Pascal. They had such a low opinion that one of the founding fathers of UNIX  *Brian W. Kernighan *wrote a very influential paper about it titled 
"*Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language*".
*Niklaus Wirth* apparently had a low opinion of the practical value of Pascal programming language that he created another programming language (one of several he created) called *Oberon* *programming language* with specific objective of using it to write his own operating system
You must have attended Oxford University (UK) since that is the only CS department (besides ETH of course) on the world which considers *Oberon operating system* so important that it is uses it in teaching. Other people not so much.
That being said *Niklaus Wirth* is one of the greatest computer scientists of 20 century who spent most of his early in mid career here in North America and commands great respect including the respect of founding fathers of C and UNIX. I have had true privilege attending one of his colloquium lectures about 10 years ago at Stanford University. Great speaker, great scientist. The high point of the lecture was when* Don Knuth* stood up, introduced himself (these caused great cheer in the audience as we all knew who was Don) and asked Nik to clarify few ideas. Nik just smiled obviously humbled by the whole experience and gave an extraordinary deep and clear explanation.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jan 7, 2016)

Oko said:


> Oh dear why are you posting that nonsense


And nonsense it is (no smiley face).


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## wblock@ (Jan 7, 2016)

It's not supposed to be taken seriously.  Pretty sure that's been around a long, long time.


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## scottro (Jan 7, 2016)

I believe that is meant to be a joke.  I've seen it before.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jan 7, 2016)




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## Carpetsmoker (Jan 8, 2016)




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## igorino (Jan 10, 2016)

It's just a joke. =D


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## fnoyanisi (Feb 2, 2016)

Some time ago, I read The Daemon, the Gnu, and the Penguin and liked it (no jokes in it )

It gives a good history of how UNIX was born from the ashes of Multics (wuuooww...) and different UNIX vendors/standards appeared over the years.


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