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Comment by balder1991 | Hacker News Reader

balder1991

But I think it’s relevant to say that before writing Unix he was working on Multics for a long time already. Unix was a “simplified” version of it, if I remember well. So it didn’t “spring out of thin air.”

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Unix was a kind of play word for Unique as an anti-thesis for Multics that latter was originally designed for modern multi-user and multi-process OS. Ironically as any real-world OS Unix eventually becomes multi-user system similar to Multics but the name stucked. Granted Unix has a very simple (as in simple as possible but no simpler) multi-user permission and security system that work reliably for many decades until now. Of all the organizations NSA actually even come up with a better replacement for the modern Unix permission and security model with SELinux, but most users just ignored and disabled SELinux although it's installed by default by many major Linux distros [1].

[1] SELinux is unmanageable; just turn it off if it gets in your way:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31176138

I understood it was Unix for 'one mechanism' or 'unified' instead of the broad everything-but-the-kitchen-sink Multix approach. That was the joke I understood. Notthing about single-user.

Not something that you can disable on Android, or on properly managed Linux servers, where devs only get what they should touch on.

"We even knew that it had a joke name, Unix, coined by Brian Kernighan, that was a reference to Multics."

https://multicians.org/unix.html

"Brian Kernighan takes credit for the idea, but adds that 'no one can remember' the origin of the final spelling Unix."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix

Also note that Prof. Kernighan has written a historical memoir about Unix:

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/

>So it didn’t “spring out of thin air.”

Right. Almost nothing does.

You see, it's https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

Mmm, even early versions ended up being more the "anti-multics" than actually simplified-from, despite the name pun...

Where did the quoted text come from? Something might have gotten edited.

Absolutely.

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