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Path: utzoo!watmath!watcgl!dmmartindale
From: dmmartindale@watcgl.UUCP (Dave Martindale)
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: Re: Teaching UNIX
Message-ID: <369@watcgl.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 8-Nov-84 12:08:36 EST
Article-I.D.: watcgl.369
Posted: Thu Nov  8 12:08:36 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 9-Nov-84 07:17:02 EST
References: <88@athena.UUCP> <640@clyde.UUCP>
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 75

> 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.

Are you suggesting that UNIX is a "fad" operating system, while VMS,
VM/CMS and friends are "real" operating systems?
 
> 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. 

I read this as saying that a "large CDC, Cray, or IBM" machine can support
a large number of users because it prevents anyone from using one of the
more powerful tools of modern computer science.  Quite true.  I consider
that an argument for, not against, UNIX.  Also, consider just how many
VAXes you can buy for the price of one large CDC machine, or a Cray.
And there are UNIX machines that give better performance/price than a VAX.

> 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.

Doesn't this indicate that either you need more VAXes, or someone needs
to allocate the existing VAX time more fairly?  Again, you seem to be
arguing that a non-UNIX system is better than UNIX because nobody really
wants to use it, so there won't be much competition for its resources!

> When you start talking pragmatics, you should look at both sides of 
> the problem. 

I try to do that.  At Waterloo, most of the undergraduate CS teaching is
NOT done on UNIX.  But the reasons are a bit different than those you
postulate above.  Certain 4th year and graduate courses are taught on
UNIX because they need some of the facilities that UNIX offers.  These
pretty well saturate the available capacity on the teaching VAXes.
There are a number of research VAXes that cannot be used for teaching
because they were bought with research grant funds or donated by
the manufacturer on the condition that they be used for research.

Meanwhile, we have a Honeywell mainframe that has about the raw CPU power
of a 780 but much higher I/O bandwidth and a sufficiently dumb front end
that you cannot run a screen editor.  It will support something like twice
as many users as a 780.  It gets used heavily for teaching, not because
it is necessarily better than the VAXes, but because it is there and it works.

Much teaching is also done on a group of IBM 4300-series machines that
are run by the university's computing centre.  The computing centre has
a long history of commitment to IBM, for their own reasons.  The hardware
is there, it runs, the computing centre has a large staff to provide
support for users.  This mass of hardware is capable of handling very
large numbers of users, and is the most suitable machine for most large
long-running number-crunching jobs, so it gets used for this.

Note that the choices here are primarily ones of which hardware can best
handle which courses, and only secondarily which operating system people
would like to use.

There are certainly a number of people who do avoid UNIX because of the
difficulty of understanding the system when all you have to go on is
the standard manual set.  The computing centre has user consultants and 
teaches quite a variety of courses periodically, making it much easier
for an occasional computer user to learn how to use the IBM systems.
The organization that runs the Honeywell and VAXes simply doesn't have
the resources for this.  The computing centre now has a VAX running
UNIX, though, so this situation may change.  (Now if only they'd run
UTS on the IBM processors...)