how do you capitalize UNIX??!?
Ed McCreary
IEEE Spectrum. Mucho gracias to those who have replied to my previous
question.
What is the "official" way to write "unix". As far as I can tell, AT&T
uses all caps, UNIX. Is this standard for all flavors? How do the people
involved with BSD do it?
The article is going to be in the spirit of William Safire, so if you
have any interesting tales on the origin of names of different software
packages or machines, please followup or reply to one of the addresses
in my signature. The return path in the header is bogus.
p.s. and yes, he has a copy of TNHD, I gave it to him for his birthday.
thanks,
eddie
--
McCr...@sword.eng.hou.compaq.com Computers are like Old Testament gods;
EMcC...@uh.edu lots of rules and no mercy.
#include <stddisclaimer.h> Joseph Campbell
"Ooooohhhh we got movie sign!!" MST3K
Sean Eric Fagan
>What is the "official" way to write "unix". As far as I can tell, AT&T
>uses all caps, UNIX. Is this standard for all flavors? How do the people
>involved with BSD do it?
UNIX is a registered trademark of somebody, originally Bell Labs, now
possibly USL. It is always UNIX; the lawyers involved have to defend their
trademark or lose it, so they would be very upset at it being "unix" or
"Unix" or any other combination, especially without their trademark being
noted.
A couple of years ago, some AT&T employees were doing their best to point
this out, but, as usual, nobody cared.
--
Sean Eric Fagan | "One form to rule them all, one form to find them, one
s...@kithrup.COM | form to bring them all and in the darkness rewrite the
-----------------+ hell out of them" -- sendmail ruleset 3 comment from DEC.
Any opinions expressed are my own, and generally unpopular with others.
W. Richard Stevens
His reply was something like: Yes, Unix is a trademark of whomever,
but the owner of a trademark has no legal right to tell you how to
use that trademark in English usage. That includes the capitalization
and whether it's an adjective, noun, or whatever. Acknowledge that
it's a trademark (I think the circle-R superscript is normal) and
capitalize it any way you like. The AT&T trademark lawyers might
send you a letter if they don't like the way you use their trademark,
but you're welcome to tell them where to put the letter. (Believe it
or not, at a tutorial I was presenting at the Anaheim Usenix, an
AT&T employee came up to me and told me just that--he didn't like
the way I used the word "Unix" in my tutorial notes. I was using
it as a noun, while he said it should only be an adjective.)
Personally, I always use "Unix", since anything all-caps throughout a
book looks awful. I think the Chicago Manual of Style says all-caps
only if the term is an acronym (such as FORTRAN for "formula
translation"). Unix is not an acronym.
Now, obviously AT&T employees may fall under a different set of
guidelines with regard to things such as books that they write,
but even there we find differences. K&R uses "UNIX" while the
AWK book uses "Unix". Also, licensees of the trademark fall
under a different set of guidelines.
Rich Stevens (rste...@noao.edu)
Guy Harris
>His reply was something like: Yes, Unix is a trademark of whomever,
>but the owner of a trademark has no legal right to tell you how to
>use that trademark in English usage. That includes the capitalization
>and whether it's an adjective, noun, or whatever.
So how does DMR capitalize it these days? It was all-caps in the 1978
BSTJ issue on UNIX in the Ritchie/Thompson paper "The UNIX Time-Sharing
System", but I don't have the CACM issue from which it comes handy, so I
don't know if they put it in all caps there, or did it differently but
had it "corrected" by the AT&T trademark lawyers before it was put in
the BSTJ issue. I got a message from somebody a while ago indicating
that some AT&T Bell Labs person (one of the ones who *does* use the
shift key on their keyboard when typing alphabetic characters, as I
remember :-)) didn't capitalize it recently....
>Now, obviously AT&T employees may fall under a different set of
>guidelines with regard to things such as books that they write,
>but even there we find differences. K&R uses "UNIX" while the
>AWK book uses "Unix". Also, licensees of the trademark fall
>under a different set of guidelines.
Yes, and System V appears to just call it "unix", as the file that's
booted when you start the system is called "/unix", not "/UNIX" or even
"/UNIX\256", the latter being what it should be, at least on systems
supporting ISO 8859/1, in order to properly mark it as a trademark. :-)