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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The phrase "You are Not Expected to Understand This" is probably the most famous comment in the history of Unix.

And last month, at the Systems We Love conference in San Francisco, systems researcher Arun Thomas explained to an audience exactly what it was that they weren't supposed to understand.

Computer science teacher Ozan Onay, who was in the audience, called it "one of my favorite talks of the day," writing on his blog that "Nothing should be a black box, even when Dennis Ritchie says it's ok!"

The code comment originally appeared in the Sixth Edition Unix operating system, describing context switching — or, as Thomas put it, "the mechanism that allows for time-sharing and multi-tasking ... essentially how a computer is allowed to be shared by multiple concurrent users and concurrent applications."

Thomas reminded the audience of Unix co-creator Dennis Ritchie's own "Comment about the comment" web page on the subject:

It's often quoted as a slur on the quantity or quality of the comments in the Bell Labs research releases of Unix. Not an unfair observation in general, I fear, but in this case unjustified... we tried to explain what was going on. 'You are not expected to understand this' was intended as a remark in the spirit of 'This won't be on the exam,' rather than as an impudent challenge.

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