> After I gave my speech, there were questions from the audience. Someone asked a question in French, which was translated to me as, roughly, "You say that Mult

> After I gave my speech, there were questions from the audience. Someone asked a question in French, which was translated to me as, roughly, "You say that Multics has only 25 sites. There are already 1500 Unix sites. How does that make you feel?" > I said, "I feel proud. It was a privilege to work with Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie on Multics, and I am glad to see Unix having the success it deserves." I said more, about the difference in goals of the systems, and about how much easier it was to do things the second time. > Afterward the local Multicians told me my questioner was one of an anti-Multics faction in Bull. It occurs to me now that he was probably more likely pro-Unix than anti-Multics, but in those days there was a lot of fear and with-us-or-against-us thinking, and Multics was fighting for its life as usual. I don't think my answer satisfied either faction. > When I finally got a chance to use Unix in 1987, on an Apollo workstation at Tandem, I felt instantly at home. The ls command, control arguments, shell scripts... lots of things felt so similar to Multics that I could go right to work, consulting man pages occasionally to find out what the Unix name of something was.