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From: jona@clyde.UUCP (Jon Allingham)
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: Re: Teaching UNIX
Message-ID: <640@clyde.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 8-Nov-84 08:13:31 EST
Article-I.D.: clyde.640
Posted: Thu Nov  8 08:13:31 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 9-Nov-84 07:12:24 EST
References: <88@athena.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Whippany NJ
Lines: 36

> ...
> There is plenty of room for specialists, but I'd still think twice about
> a physician who's never delivered a baby nor sutured a cut.  And right
> now, with the computer industry as it is, I'd "wonder" about an
> undergraduate program which did not include any study of UNIX or closely
> related system.  I'd discount the program until they convinced me that
> they really did have a good replacement.

I think this is a totally unreasonable expectation. As has been mentioned
in previous articles, universities are in the business of teaching
concepts, problem solving, and ( for CS programs ) structured programming
which should enable any graduate to learn how to use most any other
language/OS/computer when it is needed as opposed to trying to learn
every one of the popular, fad operating systems and languages that comes
along.

Also, due to the lack of funding, most schools cannot run out and buy
a new computer system at whim. Most computers that support Un*x are
for the most part small and aren't able to support the load that the
average university wants to put on them. Try running some extremely
large number crunching problems on a Un*x machine sometime. I'll take
a large CDC, Cray, or IBM any day. See what happens when more than
25 people want to use EMACS at once. 

Another problem is faculty "hogging" of resources. The popularity of Un*x
is such that faculty members want to do all their pet research projects
on the VAX ( or whatever ) and severely restrict access by students
to the machine.

When you start talking pragmatics, you should look at both sides of 
the problem. 
-- 
				Jon M. Allingham
				(201) 386-3466
				AT&T Bell Laboratories
				Rm 2A-110 Whippany, NJ