My recollection from Bell Labs (Naperville location in the mid-80's) was that
the lawyers hadcome up with some scheme where UNIX had to be all caps plus in a
"unique" font. These werethe days of nroff/mmx and the nascent times of
device-independent troff so we used the smallerall-caps "UNIX" string to meet
those criteria. Our style was to make any all-caps string 1-pointsize smaller
than the other text just because it looked better so we had to go to
\s-2UNIX\s+2.
But I don't remember us using the U\s-2NIX\s+2 string.
meg
From: Eric S. Raymond <e...@thyrsus.com>
To: Doug McIlroy <d...@cs.dartmouth.edu>
Cc: groff@gnu.org
Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2015 5:26 PM
Subject: Re: [Groff] Proper Small Caps.
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>
