Posted by Dr. Science on 10/29/2014 in
Question |
How come we never hear about UNIX anymore? What was it, anyway?
———- from John Kaplan of Milpitas, CA
UNIX was an easy-to-use language developed by unusually demented geeks who couldn’t read or write Fortran. First licensed by Radio Shack for use in their House Buddy computers, it allowed you to copy recipes onto 3 x 5 cards at the rate of one per hour. Eventually it was supplanted by Basic, and taught to chimpanzees who were able to write programs with an error rate approaching 50%. While not good, they fared better with Basic than UNIX, so the language was allowed to die a natural death. Today it’s only used in Albania and parts of Western Kamchatka.