jvz@sdcsvax.UUCP (John Van Zandt) (10/18/84)
Any college education is supposed to teach the fundamentals, not specific examples. A student leaving such an institution should be capable of learning and adapting to new environments and new ideas. Whether a student learns the details of any specific operating system or programming language is irrelevant. A student with a good education should be able to learn 'C' or UNIX very quickly; the principles are common across languages and O/S's. And the suggestion which was made that UNIX/C should be included because of popularity has problems, because popularity says nothing about the underlying principles which might be better taught in other ways. Remember, students going to a 4-year college/university have very few classes in their major field. Wasting one of the classes to learn the popular items might cause the student to miss something more fundamental which would be of help in the future. Remember, the difference between a trade school and a university is in what is taught and the expected product. Trade schools are great at teaching how to use a specific language/operating system. John Van Zandt University of California, San Diego ucbvax!sdcsvax!jvz
bass@dmsd.UUCP (John Bass) (10/26/84)
John Van Zandt raises some good points ... teaching a how to use UNIX class is clearly a waste of student/teacher time. However, I believe he totally missed the point of discussion. At hand is the issue of many university CS/ENGR departments still only providing 1960's computational resources which ARE NOT good examples of 1980's how to do things right (or the principles behind good system design). For a CS Department to teach principles without up to date facilities is equally a waste of student/teacher time. It is easy for staff in the UC system to accept UNIX as an every day tool that everybody just USES. UNIX access is provided as an important resource to most CS students in the UC system. However in many other campuses (like the Cal State system) UNIX machines are non-existant or locked away for Prof's and Grad students -- maybe a single 11/4? or 11/750 on the whole campus. In most of these schools CDC NOS or IBM 370 OS's are used and taught. This was fine in 1970, but it is like teaching VLSI design in the class room and vacumun tube technology in the lab. The resulting VLSI design major has missed 2 generations or more of technology and is a poor risk to industry without a LOT of additional training. The text book learning of VLSI was not backed up with practical experience. Only a program with CAD, 3 or 4 inch foundry access and real student chip projects allows the principles of VLSI design to be learned. Likewise a 1980's CS student who only has access to CDC NOS resources will miss all the fine points of two generations of Computer Science progress. Their personal tool kit and experience base is so limited that a LOT of additional training (or personal learning) is required to adapt to design issues of micro-computers, CAD/CAM workstations, personal workstations, networks, and distributed systems designs. Unfortunately, most of the micro computer systems built with 1980's hardware still use 1960's software technology ... at least providing UNIX on campuses gives the students access to late 1970's technology. Hopefully network and workstation technology will follow soon. UNIX is not the end product ... but is a minimum tool set to address the principles and problems associated with system design in the 1980's and beyond. John Bass