[TUHS] Re: Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

[Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org>]

On 7/3/24 8:17 AM, Vincenzo Nicosia wrote:

> I think it would be terribly misleading to teach young CS students that
> software projects should be managed "as Unix v6 came to life". They will
> never, ever find anything even close to that environment in a
> professional workplace. We should tell them that some of the most
> beautiful software projects ever crafted by humans did not come out of
> the "professionalism churches" that the overwhelming majority of
> software companies are nowadays, based on  the blind application of
> "mainstream" software development and project management principles,
> according to which they (the CS majors) are just "as fungible and
> replaceable as a chair, or a wallpaper". That would be only true and
> fair to tell them.
> 

I was inside Apple for a LONG time, and if you were going to write a
horror story case history, the Mac OS would be it, right through the
death march that occurred during the OS X transition (bringing this
around to Unix history). You don't hear anything about the people
past the "Magnificent Seven" of the original Mac team. There were
many and many people were burned out in the process, including almost
all of the original team one way or another.