Re: UNIX or Unix?

[Sandy Harris <sandy -at- storm -dot- ca>]

"Susan W. Gallagher" wrote:
> 
> Simple answer -- it's a registered trademark. See
>   http://www.unix-systems.org/
> for more info.

That answer is too simple.

It was originally Unix, and lots of old Unix hackers like me insist
on spelling it that way. 

Sometime in the early 80s, the AT&T folks who were marketing it decided
that UNIX was the preferred spelling. That is now widely used.

It is consistently spelled Unix on home pages for some of the major
contributors to the design:

Dennis Ritchie
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/
Brian Kernighan:
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/

Ken Thompson uses both:
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/ken/

The jargon file has:
http://tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/The-Jargon-Lexicon-framed.html

| Some people are confused over whether this word is appropriately `UNIX'
| or `Unix'; both forms are common, and used interchangeably. Dennis Ritchie
| says that the `UNIX' spelling originally happened in CACM's 1974 paper "The
| UNIX Time-Sharing System" because "we had a new typesetter and troff had
| just been invented and we were intoxicated by being able to produce small
| caps." Later, dmr tried to get the spelling changed to `Unix' in a couple 
| of Bell Labs papers, on the grounds that the word is not acronymic. He
| failed, and eventually (his words) "wimped out" on the issue. So, while
| the trademark today is `UNIX', both capitalizations are grounded in ancient
| usage; the Jargon File uses `Unix' in deference to dmr's wishes.

We're back to "know your audience". As an old Unix user, I expect to see
it spelled "Unix" and take the other usage, in a technical context, as a
(mild) indicator of possible cluelessness.

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