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B Creators Admit C, Unix Were Hoax FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thomp- son, Dennis Ritchie, and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating system and C programming language created by them is an elaborate April Fools prank kept alive for more than 20 years. Speaking at the recent UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson revealed the follow- ing: “In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work with the GE/AT&T Multics project. Brian and I had just started working with an early release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth’s ETH labs in Swit- zerland, and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and power. Dennis had just finished reading Bored of the Rings, a hilari- ous National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien Lord of the Rings trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics environ- ment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users’ frus- tration levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more risque allusions. “Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called “A.” When we found others were actually trying to create real