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

[Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>]

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s/be far/be fair/

Sorry, Grammerly rewrote that and I missed it with my dyslexia.
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On Wed, Jul 3, 2024 at 11:45 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Jul 3, 2024 at 10:46 AM Norman Wilson <norman@oclsc.org> wrote:
>
>> Steve Jenkin:
>>
>>    I've never heard of a Computer Science or Software Engineering program
>>    that included a `case study' component, especially for Software
>>    Development & Projects.
>>
>> [...]
>>
>>    How about the course for which John Lions wrote his famous
>> exegesis of the 6/e kernel?
>>
>> Norman Wilson
>> Toronto ON
>
> This >>might<< be far from an OS >>developer<< perspective [*i.e*., for a
> practitioner of SW development for an OS]. However, I'm quite sure it is
> the same thing.    In Lion's case, he looks at the code and final system in
> the same manner to examine the technical output/result  (a complete
> timesharing system than in "modest HW", that a single person could
> understand as it was less than 9000 KLOCs).   This is like an architecture
> class might take apart drawings of Notre Dame Cathedral to examine how the
> structure was developed to carry such huge loads of stone, wood, and lead
> but still allow so much light in the building (such as the class on my CMU
> roommates who became a restoration architect for buildings like 30th Street
> Station in Philadelphia).  Case studies (which originated at HSB and are
> now de rigor in most B-schools) look at the choices made, given a set of
> initial conditions to create a (business) result [positively and
> negatively].   What could be learned from the conditions, choices, and
> results so that feature (business) leaders can recognize what might not be
> obvious? The idea is that you are teaching managers about choices
> that change/predict a future outcome.  This is not the same as field
> practitioners trying to make a structure/machine/program to >>operate<< to
> do some design function.
>
> So, the place where a case study for SW projects (using books like
> Mythical Man Month) would be helpful is an in-software engineering course.
> Writing an HSB style case for something like UNIX, or Tenex or maybe
> Oracle; particularly to compared to something like Brook's book would be
> fascinating to read, I'm not sure Lion's text qualifies.   I think the
> content of such a "case" would be quite different.
>
> Again, it comes back to what "success" is. If success is defined as
> winning the market, OS/360 was a huge success, as was DOS. But neither
> would I consider a success from the standpoint of building something that
> future generations of programmers would want to learn to emulate.
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