The project actually started with the name UNICS, which was indeed a pun on MULTICS - after Bell Labs reduced/left involvement in Project MAC and some of the fu

The project actually started with the name UNICS, which was indeed a pun on MULTICS - after Bell Labs reduced/left involvement in Project MAC and some of the future Unix creators were part of that effort. UNICS started out on way way way less capable hardware to play with some concepts that were developed on Multics, so while there were some improvements, a lot of things are the way they are because of limitations enforced by 13 bit address space of PDP-7 and later 16bit moby style memory management on PDP-11 The move to PDP-11 was related to how some programs developed for Unix found interest among other teams at Bell Labs, and the budget for PDP-11 came from supporting secretaries working on patent documents with troff and related programs.