This has always been one of my favorite items that proves unix comes with a sense of humor.

                     CREATORS ADMIT UNIX, C HOAX

     In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken
     Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan admitted that the
     Unix operating system and C programming language created by
     them is an elaborate prank kept alive for over 20 years.
     Speaking at the recent UnixWorld Software Development Forum,
     Thompson revealed the following:

     "In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work with the
     GE/Honeywell/AT&T Multics project. Brian and I had started
     work with an early release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus
     Wirth's ETH labs in Switzerland and we were impressed with its
     elegant simplicity and power. Dennis had just finished reading
     'Bored of the Rings', a National Lampoon parody of the
     Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy. As a lark, we decided
     to do parodies of the Multics environment and Pascal. Dennis
     and I were responsible for the operating environment. We
     looked at Multics and designed the new OS to be as complex and
     cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration
     levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as
     other more risque allusions.  We sold the terse command
     language to novitiates by telling them that it saved them
     typing.

     Then Dennis and Brian worked on a warped version of Pascal,
     called 'A'.

     'A' looked a lot like Pascal, but elevated the notion of the
     direct memory address (which Wirth had banished) to the
     central concept of the language.  This was Dennis's
     contribution, and he in fact coined the term "pointer" as an
     innocuous sounding name for a truly malevolent construct.
     Brian must be credited with the idea of having absolutely no
     standard I/O specification:  this ensured that at least 50% of
     the typical commercial program would have to be re-coded when
     changing hardware platforms.  Brian was also responsible for
     pitching this lack of I/O as a feature: it allowed us to
     describe the language as "truly portable".

     When we found others were actually creating real programs with
     A, we removed compulsory type-checking on function arguments.
     Later, we added a notion we called "casting": this allowed the
     programmer to treat an integer as though it were a 50kb
     user-defined structure.  When we found that some programmers
     were simply not using pointers, we eliminated the ability to
     pass structures to functions, enforcing their use in even the
     simplest applications.  We sold this, and many other features,
     as enhancements to the efficiency of the language. In this
     way, our prank evolved into B, BCPL, and finally C.

     We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:

     for(;P("\n"),R-;P("|"))for(e=C;e-;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2

     At one time, we joked about selling this to the Soviets to set
     their computer science progress back 20 or more years.

     Unfortunately, AT&T and other US corporations actually began
     using Unix and C.  We decided we'd better keep mum, assuming
     it was just a passing phase.

     In fact, it's taken US companies over 20 years to develop
     enough expertise to generate useful applications using this
     1960's technological parody. We are impressed with the
     tenacity of the general Unix and C programmer. In fact, Brian,
     Dennis and I have never ourselves attempted to write a
     commercial application in this environment.

     We feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion and truly
     awesome programming projects that have resulted from our silly
     prank so long ago."

     Dennis Ritchie said:  "What really tore it (just when AIDA was
     catching on), was that Bjarne Stroustrup caught onto our joke.
     He extended it to further parody Smalltalk.  Like us, he was
     caught by surprise when nobody laughed.  So he added multiple
     inheritance, virtual base classes, and later ... templates.
     All to no avail.  So we now have compilers that can compile
     100,000 lines per second, but need to process header files for
     25 minutes before they get to the meat of "Hello, World".

     Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including AT&T,
     Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, and DEC have refused
     comment at this time.

     Borland International, a leading vendor of object-oriented
     tools, including the popular Turbo Pascal and Borland C++,
     stated they had suspected this for a couple of years.  In
     fact, the notoriously late Quattro Pro for Windows was
     originally written in C++.  Phillipe Kahn said: "After two and
     a half years programming, and massive programmer burn-outs, we
     re-coded the whole thing in Turbo Pascal in three months.  I
     think it's fair to say that Turbo Pascal saved our bacon".
     Another Borland spokesman said that they would continue to
     enhance their Pascal products and halt further efforts to
     develop C/C++.

     Professor Wirth of the ETH institute and father of the Pascal,
     Modula 2 and Oberon structured languages, cryptically said "P.
     T. Barnum was right."  He had no further comments.

-------------

almost forgot this one, needed to keep a copy of this handy as well...

                               Alice in UNIX Land

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Alice was reading the message on her monitor and beginning to suspect
that everything was not as it should be. "Program too big to fit in
memory," it read.

"Curiouser and curiouser," she said, "All I did was load fourteen TSRs
before starting my word processor. With four megabytes, I wish I could
use more than 640K."

"At that moment, a small white consultant ( a very white consultant)
ran across the room. "Oh my coat and necktie," he said, "I'm going to
be late for my appointment. And at one fifty an hour, too." Before
Alice could say anything, he leaped into her monitor and disappeared
behind her operating system.

Alice thought that she had never seen anyone leap into a monitor
before; and certainly not go clean through the operating system. But
then, she had been told that DOS was very shallow. Without hesitating
a moment, she leaped in after him.

She found herself in a shiny corridor. Not knowing what else to do,
she began walking. Turning a corner, she found herself facing two fat
little men, each with an arm round the other's neck. One had "POS"
embroidered on his collar, and the "NEG".

"I know," said Alice, "you two are a transistor."

"Yes," said Positive.

"Can you help me? asked Alice.

"No," said Negative.

"I'm looking for a white consultant." Alice pointed in the direction
she had been walking. "Did he go this way?" she asked.

"No," said Negative.

She pointed the other way.

"Yes," said Positive.

Soon Alice came upon a large brown table. The Consultant was there, as
was an apparently Mad Hacker, and several creatures that Alice did not
recognize. In one corner sat a Dormouse fast asleep. Over the table
was a large sign that read "UNIX Conference."

Everyone except the Dormouse was holding a paper cup, from which they
were sampling what appeared to be custard. "Wrong flavor," they all
declared as they passed the cup the cup to the creature on their right
and graciously took the one being offered on their left. Alice watched
them repeat this ritual three or four times before she approached and
sat down.

Immediately, a large toad leaped into her lap and looked at her as if
it wanted to be loved. "Grep," it exclaimed.

"Don't mind him," explained the Mad Hacker. "He's just looking for
some string."

"Nroff?" asked the Frog.

The Mad Hacker handed Alice a cup of custard-like substance and a
spoon. "Here," he said, "what do you think of this?"

"It looks lovely," said Alice, "very sweet." She tried a spoonful.
"Yuck!" she cried. "It's awful. What is it?"

"Oh just another graphic interface for UNIX," answered the Hacker.

Alice pointed to the sleeping Dormouse. "Who's he?" she asked.

"That's OS Too," explained the Hacker. "We've pretty much given up on
waking him.

"Just than, a large, Blue Elephant sitting next to the Dormouse stood
up. "Ladies and gentlemen," he trumpeted pompously, "as the largest
creature here, I feel impelled to state that we must take an Open Look
at..."

A young Job Sparrow on the other side of the table stood up angrily.
The Elephant noticed and changed his speech accordingly."...what our
NextStep will be.

"Half the creatures bowed in respect while the other half snickered
quietly to themselves. Just then, OS Too fell over in his sleep,
crashing into the Elephant and taking him down with him. No one seemed
a bit surprised.

"What we need," declared a Sun Bear as he lapped up custard with his
long tongue," is a flavor that goes down like the Macintosh.

"Suddenly, the White Consultant began jumping up and down as his face
got red. "No, no, no! he screamed. "No one pays one fifty an hour to
Macintosh consultants!"

"Awk," said the Frog.

"Users," explained the Sun Bear, "want an easy interface that they
will not have to learn."

"Users?" cried the Consultant in disbelief. "Users?! You mean
secretaries, accountants, architects. Manual laborers!"

"Well," responded the Sun Bear, "we've got to do something to make
them want to switch to UNIX."

"Do you think," said a Woodpecker who had been busy making a hole in
the table, "that there might be a problem with the name `UNIX?' I
mean, it does sort of suggest being less than a man."

"Maybe we should try another name, " suggested the Job Sparrow, "like
Brut, or Rambo."

"Penix," suggested a Penguin.

"Mount," said the Frog, "spawn."

Alice slapped him. "Nice?" he asked.

"But then again," suggested the Woodpecker, "what about the shrinkwrap
issue?"

Suddenly, everyone leaped up and started dashing about, waving their
hands in the air and screaming. Just as suddenly, they all sat down
again.

"Now that that's settled," said the Woodpecker, "let's go back to
tasting flavors."

Everyone at the table sampled a new cup of custard. "Wrong flavor,"
they all declared as they passed the cup to the creature on their
right and took the one being offered on their left.

Totally confused, Alice got up and left. After she had been walking
away, she heard a familiar voice behind her.

"Rem," it said, "edlin."

Alice turned and saw the Frog. She smiled. "Those are queer sounding
words," she said, "but at least I know what they mean."

"Chkdsk," said the Frog.