Doug McIlroy <d...@cs.dartmouth.edu>: > > Thought it might be of interest given troff's > > long-time S\s-2MALL\s0 C\s-2APS\s0, especially used in the formatting of > > Unix. IIRC, Dennis Ritchie said they did it because the CAT gave them > > the possibility, but it was regretted for the UNIX/Unix confusion it > > caused. > > I think this is urban legend. Small caps were not used in UNIX > manuals or in the Bell System Technical Journal articles about > UNIX. Fairly early on, we in the Unix lab began to treat Unix > as a proper noun, but the lawyers had trademarked the uppercase > name and got their way in many publications, including the books > by Kernighan and Ritchie and Kernighan and Pike. U\s-2NIX\s0 > was very rare, if it ever happened at all.
Thank you for clearing that up. It's a minor point, never worth bothering you about, but I've been wondering about it for decades. -- <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>