23 Aug
2026
23 Aug
'26
11:07 p.m.
Warner,
(slide 24 in the PPT)
https://www.reddit.com/r/unix/comments/1t826y8/emailed_ken_thompson_about_t…
Not the most assuring source, but it is from earlier this year and
apparently directly from Ken. But my interpretation is this spelling was
never actually written down or even typed, just an in-house office
reference for maybe hours/days at most. Ken himself may have never used
this, he refers to bwk.
On Mon, Aug 24, 2026 at 12:02 AM Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
On Sun, Aug 23, 2026 at 2:47 AM Steve Lewis via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
- some verification that UNIX was (sort of)
originally called UNICS (see
footnotes in the PPT notes), never formally written down but "verified" in
the past year
How was this verified? When I tried to find contemporary documentation
I couldn't find any and Ken Thompson said that it went directly from 'Ken's
New System" to Unix without 'unics' when I emailed him in 2020 before my
history of unix talk at FOSDEM. At the time, I could just find third-hand
stories about the "unics" story.
There's no footnotes in the pdf and I can't open the ppt file, so I'm
curious
what you've found.
Warner