ugleung@cs.Buffalo.EDU (Leung Lee) (06/25/89)
I have one fundamental question. What is the story concerning the frequent use of "GNU" as a prefix to many Unix programs, such a emacs, troff, etc. I realized this probably has its origin in the American culture! Is this correct! Can anyone give some kind of historical insights? Thanks Leung
sullivan@marge.math.binghamton.edu (fred sullivan) (06/26/89)
> I have one fundamental question. What is the story concerning the > frequent use of "GNU" as a prefix to many Unix programs, such a emacs, > troff, etc. I realized this probably has its origin in the American > culture! Is this correct! Can anyone give some kind of historical > insights? GNU is an acronym for Gnu's not Unix. The goal of the Free Software Foundation is to provide a no-cost operating system functionally equivalent to Unix. They have already released a lot of utilities, including GNU Emacs, but not a kernel (yet). Fred Sullivan SUNY at Binghamton Dept. Math. Sciences Binghamton, NY 13903 sullivan@marge.math.binghamton.edu First you make a roux! -- Fred Sullivan SUNY at Binghamton Dept. Math. Sciences Binghamton, NY 13903 sullivan@marge.math.binghamton.edu First you make a roux!
sabbagh@acf3.NYU.EDU (sabbagh) (06/26/89)
In article <7364@cs.Buffalo.EDU> ugleung@cs.Buffalo.EDU (Leung Lee) writes: >I have one fundamental question. What is the story concerning the >frequent use of "GNU" as a prefix to many Unix programs, such a emacs, >troff, etc. I realized this probably has its origin in the American >culture! Is this correct! Can anyone give some kind of historical >insights? As I understand it, GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix". A self-referential company name! -hgs
silvert@cs.dal.ca (Bill Silvert) (06/27/89)
In article <7364@cs.Buffalo.EDU> ugleung@cs.Buffalo.EDU (Leung Lee) writes:
?I have one fundamental question. What is the story concerning the
?frequent use of "GNU" as a prefix to many Unix programs, such a emacs,
?troff, etc. I realized this probably has its origin in the American
?culture! Is this correct! Can anyone give some kind of historical
?insights?
GNU is Not Unix, which is both true and recursive.
--
Bill Silvert, Habitat Ecology Division.
Bedford Institute of Oceanography, Dartmouth, NS, Canada B2Y 4A2
UUCP: ...!{uunet,watmath}!dalcs!biomel!bill
Internet: biomel@cs.dal.CA BITNET: bs%dalcs@dalac.BITNETemmonsl@csusac.uucp (L. Scott Emmons) (06/27/89)
In article <7364@cs.Buffalo.EDU>, ugleung@cs.Buffalo.EDU (Leung Lee) writes: > I have one fundamental question. What is the story concerning the > frequent use of "GNU" as a prefix to many Unix programs, such a emacs, > troff, etc. I realized this probably has its origin in the American > culture! Is this correct! Can anyone give some kind of historical > insights? GNU, the popular freesoftware company from Berkeley, developing UNIX software, has an interesting acronym for a name... As it is a recursive definition of itself the exact expansion is a bit tricky, but basically, here it is: G GNU N not U UNIX So what's GNU? Well, GNU's not UNIX. So What's GNU? Well, GNU's not UNIX, So what does GNU mean? Well the G stands for GNU. What's GNU? GNU's not UNIX, etc...etc...ad infinitum... lse
ly@prism.TMC.COM (06/27/89)
The NU part is easy.
What I am curious about is why GNU? why G? Anyone knows?
--------
Ly Hoang ly@mirror.tmc.com
{mit-eddie, pyramid, harvard!wjh12, xait, datacube}!mirror!lysabbagh@acf3.NYU.EDU (sabbagh) (06/27/89)
In article <1989Jun26.203245.898@csusac.uucp> emmonsl@csusac.uucp (L. Scott Emmons) writes: > >GNU, the popular freesoftware company from Berkeley, developing UNIX software, ^^^^^^^^ Sorry, I wish it were so, as Berkeley is my alma mater. However,... GNU was founded by Richard Stallman, formerly (??) of MIT. There was an interesting write-up about him in the Christian Science Monitor in May. -hgs
zs04+@andrew.cmu.edu (Zachary T. Smith) (06/28/89)
GNU is not an adjective or an American cliche. When you
see a program whose name begins with GNU or which is
said to be GNU software, it means that the software is
free and that it comes from a group of people collectively
known as the GNU organization (or thereabouts).
GNU is an organization devoted to the task of rewriting the
Unix, program by program, so that they may place its
constituent parts into the public domain as they become
available. The code they write is not shareware, but is free
so long as the people who recieve it are willing to pass it
on to others in need of it, unmodified.
As it happens, lots of GNU code has been ported to
MSDOS. GNU code being for the most part written to copy
the functionality of Unix code, the existence of GNU stuff
facilitates porting of Unix utilities to DOS.
Eventually, they will have rewritten the entire thing, kernel
and all. At present they've only managed to write the
functional Unix equivalents of some of the major Unix
utilities (GNU Emacs, GNU Awk, Bison (GNU Yacc),
GDB (GNU dbx), Ghostscript (GNU postscript interpreter),
GCC (GNU C compiler), G++ (GNU C++), Gnews
(GNU mail system), etc.).
Everything they write is intended to be portable to different
architectures (GCC, for instance, can be set up to compile
for any of about 20 processors).
Their belief is that software, the OS in particular I believe,
should be free. What this means is, sometime around year
2000 you'll be able to buy their variation of Unix for the
cost of the disks (or modem time) and the work it'd take
to install it.
GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix". It's a recursive
acronym, just like XINU ("XINU Is Not Unix").
Also, for those interested, the not-yet-totally-existent GNU
Unix clone is not the only clone out there. Mach, developed
here at CMU, is essentially PD, though it's better to buy
a copy from Mt. XINU (or buy a NeXT machine) if you
want Mach. (Mach is not available for the 386, though.)
-Zach Smith (zs04@andrew.cmu.edu)mlawless@ncrwic.Wichita.NCR.COM (Mike Lawless) (06/28/89)
In article <206900127@prism> ly@prism.TMC.COM writes: > > The NU part is easy. > What I am curious about is why GNU? why G? Anyone knows? Probably because G is the only letter of the alphabet that can be tacked in front of NU to form a recognizable word. I heard of another such "recursive" acronym once. There is a program called MINCE, which is apparently a subset of EMACS. It is an acronym for: MINCE Is Not Complete EMACS Not only does this acronym refer to itself, but two of the five letters stand for acronymns. -- Mike Lawless, NCR E&M Wichita, Box 20 (316) 636-8666 (NCR: 654-8666) 3718 N. Rock Road, Wichita, KS 67226 Mike.Lawless@Wichita.NCR.COM {ece-csc,hubcap,gould,rtech}!ncrcae!ncrwic!Mike.Lawless {sdcsvax,cbatt,dcdwest,nosc.ARPA}!ncr-sd!ncrwic!Mike.Lawless
pajerek@isctsse.UUCP (Don Pajerek) (06/28/89)
In article <1040@acf3.NYU.EDU> sabbagh@acf3.UUCP () writes: >In article <7364@cs.Buffalo.EDU> ugleung@cs.Buffalo.EDU (Leung Lee) writes: >>I have one fundamental question. What is the story concerning the >>frequent use of "GNU" as a prefix to many Unix programs, such a emacs, >>troff, etc. > >As I understand it, GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix". A self-referential >company name! > >-hgs The acronym is correct. It must be said, however, that 'GNU' is the principal product of the Free Software Foundation. GNU, the product, is planned as a free, non-proprietary operating system which will be functionally equivalent to Unix (or maybe a superset). I don't know if the GNU operating system is actually available, but many components of it are, such as the EMACS editor and the GCC compiler. All of this software is free, since Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, believes that all software should be free. Don Pajerek
jbjones@marlin.NOSC.MIL (John B. Jones) (06/29/89)
In article <254@isctsse.UUCP> pajerek@isctsse.UUCP (Donald Pajerek) writes: >> >>As I understand it, GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix". A self-referential >>company name! >functionally equivalent to Unix (or maybe a superset). I don't know >if the GNU operating system is actually available, but many components >of it are, such as the EMACS editor and the GCC compiler. WHOA! Did you say that GNU actually has a C compiler out? Does anyone have a copy of this beast, and the compassion to send it to me? I would really like a copy.... John Jones jbjones@marlin.nosc.mil
jca@pnet01.cts.com (John C. Archambeau) (06/30/89)
I have GCC (the latest version as of early June that was on prep.ai.mit.edu).
And nobody in their right mind will mail you a copy of GCC, why? It's almost
3 Mb long (compressed tape archive). It is LONG! I don't even have the hard
drive space on my ST225 to uncompress it! I have it split into about 8 .tar.Z
files on 720K disks...and it's going to stay on those disks until I get a 42
Mb 1/2-height hard drive and an ARLL controller. If you want GCC, ftp to
prep.ai.mit.edu and cd to pub/gnu and it'll be sitting right there waiting for
anybody to take it. Warning, it will not run on anything less than a 386 in
386 mode (real 386 mode with a 32-bit address space). You're also going to
need GAS (GNU AS assembler) for it, that's only a poultry 500K compressed.
/*--------------------------------------------------------------------------*
* Flames: /dev/null (on my Minix partition)
*--------------------------------------------------------------------------*
* ARPA : crash!pnet01!jca@nosc.mil
* INET : jca@pnet01.cts.com
* UUCP : {nosc ucsd hplabs!hd-sdd}!crash!pnet01!jca
*--------------------------------------------------------------------------*/keithm@wicat.UUCP (Keith McQueen) (06/30/89)
Speaking of recursive acronyms... In article <5404@ncrwic.Wichita.NCR.COM> mlawless@ncrwic.UUCP (Mike Lawless) writes: > >MINCE, which is apparently a subset of EMACS. It is an acronym for: > >MINCE >Is >Not >Complete >EMACS > How about: MUNG: Mung Until No Good I always like that one! -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - | Keith McQueen, Wicat Systems Inc. , (801)224-6605 | My opinions are | | N7HMF @ NV7V (84058), 147.34+, 449.675- | all mine... | - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
allred@ut-emx.UUCP (Kevin L. Allred) (07/01/89)
In article <1180@marlin.NOSC.MIL>, jbjones@marlin.NOSC.MIL (John B. Jones) writes: > In article <254@isctsse.UUCP> pajerek@isctsse.UUCP (Donald Pajerek) writes: > >functionally equivalent to Unix (or maybe a superset). I don't know > >if the GNU operating system is actually available, but many components > >of it are, such as the EMACS editor and the GCC compiler. > WHOA! > Did you say that GNU actually has a C compiler out? Does anyone have a > copy of this beast, and the compassion to send it to me? I would really > like a copy.... Many of us would like to run gcc under MSDOS, but I don't think it is going to happen soon. As I understand it gcc likes a nice big linear address space; so the 640K memory limit and segmented architecture under MSDOS make it difficult or impossible to do a port. gcc has been ported to run on 386 processors running various version of UNIX, but I don't even think a port has been possible to 286 processors running UNIX or XENIX. What we need is for some programmer that is very familiar with the protected mode of the 386 (and willing to add this to the FSF library of programs :-), to write a protected mode shell that is just big enough to bring up gcc. That way the people with 386's (hopefully I will be one of them soon) would be able to switch from DOS to protected mode to run gcc, or programs compiled with gcc, without having to pay big bucks for a full runtime UNIX system.-- Kevin Allred allred@emx.cc.utexas.edu allred@ut-emx.UUCP
kevin@msa3b.UUCP (Kevin P. Kleinfelter) (07/01/89)
Is it pronounced "guh-new" or just "new" or "GEE-IN-YOU"? -- Kevin Kleinfelter @ Management Science America, Inc (404) 239-2347 gatech!nanovx!msa3b!kevin